This chapter explores the need for a new approach in psychiatry other than the biopsychosocial (BPS) model, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and neurobiology. Pierre Loebel and Julian Savulescu, in their introduction to this book, laid out an honourable purpose, seeking to make sense of psychiatric conditions holistically. They hoped the BPS model could serve this purpose. The model has done so in part, but also, after half a century of effort, it has failed to do so in the end. The goals are worthy and the seekers of those goals have integrity. But perhaps their intentions will be best served by something else, a successor to the past BPS model, built on a rejection of a false DSM diagnostic system as well as a purely neurobiological approach to research. In the end, what Loebel and his colleagues want to do is to preserve a place for humanism in psychiatry, and to link clinical practice to solid scientific research. These laudable principles can be achieved only by a radical departure from the DSM-based neurobiological conventional wisdom of the present and the past.
Evaluation of the effectiveness of ultrasound shear elastography and liver steatometry
