HIV/AIDS in Africa - a role for the mental health practitioner?

Abstract

In the last few decades psychiatric discourse has undergone an important change in its scope and focus. During the heady days of psychoanalytic hegemony, psychiatrists were willing to prognosticate or pontificate on just about anything, from individual neurosis through to social maladies, from medicine to literature, from the unconscious to the conscious. Nowadays, psychiatry self-consciously emphasises its origins as a medical discipline, focuses its diagnostic efforts on operationally defined psychiatric disorders, and argues the value of specific pharmacotherapies and psychotherapies in treating these conditions.