The Behavioural Sciences and Undergraduate Education in Psychiatry

The Behavioural Sciences are becoming increasingly important in medical education and in medical treatment. But medical students and the profession generally, appear to have difficulty accepting behavioural sciences as a valid part of the curriculum and in the practice of medicine. One of the reasons for this may be related to a narrow definition of the physician's social role in the years following the adoption of the Flexner Report in 1911 which emphasized the model of the physician/scientist. The perennial model of the physician occupying a social role in which science is used to increase and rationalize responsiveness to suffering has been eroded in favour of the pursuit of the scientific as the essential goal of medicine. The newer, “softer”, sciences of anthropology, ecology, economics, psychology and sociology have not fitted into the professional self-perception of the medical role. Furthermore, some departments of behavioural science have adopted an intellectual stance at times antagonistic to the rest of the medical school emphasizing the shortcomings of the profession in its delivery of health care. The aspirant medical student may have been disaffected by teachers who d