Commentary

is associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and the medical director of the Southside Acute Partial and IOP Program part of Western Behavioral Health/UPMC, in Pittsburgh, PA.

is attending psychiatrist and assistant program director for the Post Pediatric Portal Program at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Articles

The authors explore the impact of structural racism on psychiatry trainees and the patients they care for (and what can be done about it).

Why Psychiatry Training Must Include Discussions on Structural Racism

Series Editor, Frank A. Clark, MD, introduces the Black History Month series by talking about his greatest mentor when so few were available. 

Mentorship: Salute to a Windy City Educator

During the month of February, we will publish important stories commemorating Black History Month.

Psychiatric Times Honors Black History Month

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many diagnoses can it make? The photographer and psychiatrist Hugh Welch Diamond, MD, shares insights into the humanity and stigma of mental illness in Victorian England. 

The Faces of Madness

A prominent forensic psychiatrist and the grandson of founding father Alexander Hamilton, Allan McLane Hamilton, MD, was a proponent for the use of nitrous oxide for diagnostic and therapeutic use. 

Nitrous Oxide and Alexander Hamilton’s Grandson

Dr Pies is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Lecturer on Bioethics and Humanities, SUNY Upstate Medical University; Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Tufts University School of Medicine; and Editor in Chief Emeritus of 

 (2007-2010). Dr Pies is the author of several books. A collection of his works can be found on

Dr Pies offers an analysis of psychiatry’s place on the spectrum of science using “causality” and “meaning” as lenses. 

What Kind of Science Is Psychiatry?

Weaving the story of modern psychopharmacology’s birth leads us to a most surprising origin.

Never Say Dye: the Roots of Modern Psychiatric Medicines in Nineteenth-Century Fabric Colorings

In the early 20th century, British and American doctors looked for the causes of mental illnesses elsewhere in the body, with gruesome results.

The Doctors Who Cut Out Your Appendix to Fix Your Head

Avicenna may have been among the first physicians to document that anger is often a transitional state from melancholic depression to mania—implicitly recognizing the “switch” phenomenon.

How Avicenna Recognized Melancholia and Mixed States—1000 Years Before Modern Psychiatry

In 18th-century France, physicians searched for the causes of mental illness and debated how best to treat it.

History of Psychiatry