History never repeats itself, but it often rhymes, wrote Mark Twain.

Today, Edward Shorter plucks a few lessons from psychiatry's past.

Welcome to the Colette Psychiatry Podcast, keeping psychiatry honest since 2003.

I'm Chris Aiken, I'm the editor-in-chief of the Carlet Psychiatry Report.

And I'm Kelly Newsom, a psychiatric MP and a dedicated reader of every issue.

Since the 1980s, Edward Shorter has chronicled the history of psychiatry through skeptic's eye.

And today, we asked him what psychiatrists can learn from our history.

Brace yourself.

Well, you can take psychiatry and divide it really into two arms.

There's diagnosis and there's treatment.

And in both areas, history has important messages.

They aren't necessarily good messages.

In essence, history has bad news for psychiatry.

Let's start with the good news first.

Many psychiatrists are extraordinarily effective clinician.

They can make their patients reliably better, which is something you can say of no other

medical specialty with possible exception of radiation oncology.

But psychiatrists are able to do this in a way that has relatively little scientific

underpinning.

And so it's the failure of psychiatry to become a truly scientific

discipline that's a real message here that I want to get across. But the bad news is that

psychiatry has largely lost its scientific basis. Every encounter with a psychiatrist is a form

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