Australasian psychiatry : bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists
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Australas Psychiatry · Feb 2018
Historical ArticleParadigm shift in psychiatry: what may it involve?
This study aims to examine the potential nature of an ongoing paradigm shift in psychiatry that has been suggested to be occurring. ⋯ New findings in traumatology and neuroscience do form a potential platform for a paradigm shift. Prior conflicting paradigms are suggested to be due to biases arising from mental structures themselves. A new wholist perspective is proposed, which makes sense of and incorporates previous paradigms, and coheres recent understanding of right- and left-brain functioning and biopsychosocial traumatic processes and their ramifications. The perspective makes sense of the great variety of post-traumatic manifestations ranging from somatic to meaning-making dysfunctions. The wholist perspective may well be an important step in solidifying a fresh paradigmatic perspective in psychiatry.