The discussion in this article is oriented into the curriculum for the education of future psychiatrists.
In Holland the education takes four years, one year of which has to be spent in a neurological clinic.
This aspect should be altered because:
1) somatic aspects in psychiatry should be learned in confrontation with psychiatrie patients and not with neurological patients.
2) by educating 25% of the time in neurology the training in biological psychiatry, psychotherapy and social psychiatry remains deficient.
3) most of the world's psychiatrists are still medical doctors, without being trained in neurology during their psychiatrie training.
The article further focuses on the importance of social psychiatrie education in the training of psychiatrists. It is stated that the training is too much restricted to individual care and does not take the consequences of the fact that most psycho-pathological behaviour also results from living in a society with 'emotionally importants others' and depends upon the existing social systems. This often leads to conflicts between freedom and dependency and psycho-pathology is often the expression of such a conflict. A number of examples are given.
This input in the training should not lead to controversy but to the acknowledgement of the complementary functions of biologica], psychological and system-oriented approaches in psychiatry.