Psycodex #0: Introduction

A medical student's psychiatric codex on the modern classification system for disorders of the mind.

This is an introduction for a series of weekly posts in the coming 7 weeks - for fellow students, or readers that are interested in primers on what Australian medical students learn in psychiatry.

The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton (1628). Retrieved from Wikipedia.

The codex is the historical word for a book. The most prominent codices of psychiatry, as far as those that concern disorders of the mind, centre around the classification of disorders - in how we carve reality at its joints.

From clinical depression in Egyptian papyrus in 1550 BC, to diagnostic categorisations in Arabian texts in the 9th century, to Western formalisations by Burton in the 17th century, and now, to the current modern governing codex of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Today, the DSM codex is under mounting criticism from psychiatrists, academics, and advocates - from charges of clinical invalidity, commercial corruption, and diagnostic inflation that pathologises normal emotion.

In Psycodex (A student’s psychiatric codex), I extend a beginner’s perspective into the current codices of psychiatry, and steel-man the case on how it serves patients and clinicians. Each week, I’ll endeavour to post a primer on the most novel aspects of content that I learn as I go through my psychiatric rotation in medical school, drawing from lecture content, recommended textbooks, referenced articles, and punctuated with clinical stories (if appropriate).

The coming series, as per curriculum lectures, is planned to include:

1. Depression

2. Bipolar Disorder

3. Schizophrenia

4. Addiction

5. Anxiety

6. Eating Disorders

7. Personality Disorders

Psychiatry and mental illness are incredibly broad topics, spanning neuroscience, psychology, sociology, epidemiology, anthropology, history… To attempt to cover this all would require several lifetimes.

Instead, this series will seek to do the following:

• Summarise the tangible clinical and biomedical knowledge that medical students learn in psychiatry

• Contextualise this knowledge with a pluralistic perspectives from various readings at the end

The codex opens next week with depression - the term most popularised by the modern mental health zeitgeist.

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P.S. If you have any suggestions for you’re interested in, please add them in the comments!