A Critical Psychiatry Reflection on Money-Centric, Drug-Centric and Disease-Centric Mental Healthcare

Publication Details

Publication Date

10/10/2026

Volume / Issue

Vol 1, Issue 5 (2026)

Article No.

066

Journal

British Journal of Contemporary Research

DOI

https://doi.org/10.67693/BJCR-N4BF6NXR

Received

26 Sep 2026

Views

28

Downloads

18

Abstract

After more than three decades of clinical work in psychiatry, I have increasingly wondered whether the centre of psychiatric practice is, in some settings, shifting—from the person who suffers toward the disease that is diagnosed, the drug that is prescribed, and the economic structures surrounding healthcare. This is not an argument against diagnosis, medication, neuroscience, or evidence-based psychiatry. It is an argument for critical psychiatry: a willingness to examine the assumptions, limits, incentives, and unintended consequences of our own profession. In clinical practice, I have encountered patients who arrive after prolonged treatment elsewhere carrying multiple diagnoses and multiple medications, sometimes with substantial treatment burden. Such observations are clinical impressions, not prevalence data, and should not be generalized without systematic study. Yet they raise an important question: are we sometimes treating the accumulated history of psychiatric labels and prescriptions rather than the person sitting before us? Psychiatric classification is clinically useful, but diagnostic categories are not identical to the complexity of human experience. A person-centred psychiatry must therefore keep biography, context, culture, relationships, meaning, narrative, patient preference, and biological vulnerability within the same clinical frame.

License

This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License . Free to read, share, and adapt with attribution.