Although emotional problems are encountered in medical practice more often than any other type of disorder, this aspect of medical education has been relatively neglected. The average medical school graduate is quite capable of treating most organic diseases, but he is usually not adequately prepared to diagnose and to treat emotional and functional disorders, nor does he understand sufficiently the important role that emotion plays in many organic disorders.

In part, this failure has stemmed from the isolation of psychiatric treatment facilities from the rest of medical treatment facilities, and this has impaired the proper integrating of psychiatric teaching with the rest of medical training. When psychiatric facilities are set apart, even by a small distance, from those of other medical disciplines, there is danger that student and patient alike will look upon the treatment of emotional illness as something apart from medicine.

Psychiatric treatment has changed radically in the past fifteen years, with a shift away from commitment and custodial care in isolated hospitals toward early active treatment in the general hospital. There has been a significant increase in the understanding of the intimate relation between psyche and soma. It has become increasingly clear that the responsibility for dealing with the many manifestations of emotional problems belongs to all physicians and particularly to the general practitioner.

The Department of Psychiatry has for several years been cooperating with the Division of Continuing Education in Medicine of the UCLA Extension in the postgraduate training of general practitioners. Generous support from the U.S. Public Health Service, National Institute of Mental Health, has made this program possible. The symposium on Psychiatry in Medicine was part of this program. It was designed for physicians who wished to attain greater understanding of the emotional disorders encountered in practice and greater effectiveness in the treatment of such disorders.

Judging from a resolution passed by the American
Psychiatric Association ninety years ago, even a description
of the various types of psychoses was not routinely taught in
medical schools. Four conferences on psychiatric education,
held in the years 1933-1936 under the auspices of the Na-
tional Committee for Mental Hygiene, and a survey of psy-
chiatry in medical education by Drs. Ebaugh and Rymer (8) ,
published in 1942, emphasized the inadequacies of psychiatric
teaching at that time. The Ithaca Conference on Psychiatric
Education, held in 1951, once again attempted to improve
psychiatric education in medical schools. It emphasized,
among other things, the need for instruction in personality
development, psychodynamics, and interviewing, a far cry
from the purely descriptive psychiatry of the last century.

Along with changes in medical education came
changes in the treatment of psychiatric patients. Institutions
became hospitals; treatment was emphasized rather than
custody. Today we find that psychiatric hospitals are playing
an active role in training and in research and that there is an
increasing trend away from commitment to voluntary treat-
ment in general hospitals.

The awareness of the role emotions play in producing
somatic disease is vastly increased. Study of the difficult, un-
cooperative, and depressed patient has highlighted the im-
portance of emotional factors in the treatment of patients with
organic disease. The frequency with which physicians are
consulted by patients with symptoms of primarily emotional
origin is more clearly recognized.