Why do people listen to the opinions of celebrities in the first place?
That, IMO, is madness.
This is a good question, and a fairly pertinent observation, although I wouldn't characterize it as "madness" proper (from a "true" psychiatric diagnostic perspective!). It's more of a social-cultural phenomenon of our times.
IMO, in a larger sense, I guess, psychiatry, as a medical specialty, or even as a general field of scientific inquiry, has continued to "struggle" in a sense (historically speaking) to better define its own boundaries, own self-image, definition, scope of inquiry, etc. It is also linked somehow to the social and cultural, it seems, more than any other specialties of medicine or any other fields of scientific inquiry. It is so linked to human
consciousness itself, to language, and to a lot of other things we don't really know too much about at this point, in spite of tremendous advances both in the "hard core" sciences and in the "softer" social sciences, in the last few decades, that it is hard at times to really define itself, especially on the edges of knowledge, and of its real-life applications.
Let us not forget that even now, a vast majority of the presumably relatively educated public still confuses "psychology" with "psychiatry". Culturally speaking, information-dominance (including a degree of "public education") itself is much larger and has a much broader reach in the realm of entertainment and advertising vs. hard-core science info, or "social sciences" (like history, anthropology, philosophy, or even education) info. Also, people do not, in general, with limited exceptions, take role models or even have a chance to learn too much from academic educators, versus other popular "educators" (which are, again, mostly in the business of entertainnment/advertising rather than true education). This is the state of things. I do not know if it's good or bad; it's just the way things are.
Personally, as a physician, I naturally value good quality public education, especially about public health issues, (including psychiatric or general "mental health" ones), and I wish it were more largely accessible somehow, but I also realize that there are a lot of practical limits to this. At this time, even the potential current and truely valuable psychiatric knowledge applications in the larger domain of public health info dissemination in general are fairly sketchy. There are literally only a handful of Public Health academic depts. across the world which even study or apply Psychiatric/Mental Health issues in a truely useful interdisciplinary fashion the way Infectious diseases have dominated the academic field of Public health for much of the 20th century (with good cause, of course, considering the potential benefits, application benefit vs. cost ratio, and urgency of morbidity/mortality stats!). Sure, the WHO itself or other potentially interested national organisms are recognizing this, since they are often trying to integrate "mental health" more and more in the domain of public education/public health...but again...there are practical limitations to this. Schizophrenia or Affective disorders/disturbances are not going to go away very soon. I won't even go into substance abuse disorders and their repercussions on the human brains, quality of life, or even larger social and economical repercussions, often quite violent or irreversible.
I would never fault my colleagues from all over the world who are dedicated and vaillant trench-workers battling these monsters on a daily basis, nor our colleagues from academia, or other organizations who might be interested in broadening the public education aspect. But Psychiatry remains, at this time a fairly costly, artisanal/local, often inefficient, and relatively primitive effort in its educational or even preventive/treatment outreach. That's how it is. It will get better...slowly. I sure do wish though that the American Psychiatric Association would use a bit better the current information technologies towards public educational advances. IMHO, I think they could do better with what they've got as of now, than what they've been doing so far. I sure wish they would work in a more cooperative fashion with other disciplines that are also interested in good quality public education as well, that they wouldn't become TOO entrenched in their insularism. Even this entrenchment is probably "good" to a certain extent because it DOES defines certain boundaries and self-definitions of the discipline that DO need better defining. Psychiatrists are really INTO "boundaries" a lot, as you well can see! But this should be, IMHO, balanced a bit more with OUTREACH, especially in this "global info" era. Psychiatry is about communication too, about clarification, about quality education...all fields of human knowledge and activity well worth supporting, and outreaching to. Academia also, IMHO, COULD do better than they have 'til now. Personally, I would tend to favor any effort towards improving in a more general and possibly standardized fashion across the board, the educational quality of residencies themselves (which is still very variable at this time. I know ACGME IS trying, but it's not yet enough, I also know.) It wouldn't hurt if Psychiatrists-in training themselves would have some improved access (other than sheer individual/personal effort or motivation/interest) to learning more about the history and definition of the field, including maybe some potentially rather obscure and complicated elements about the "philosophy of psychiatry", the "philosophy of science", and also about the public education/public health interface, etc. It IS hard, though, to maintain an efficient, ethical or judicious balance between healthy boundaries and potentially less-than-adequate or even potentially "risky"/too "fuzzy" interdisciplinarity. But we could do better, maybe. How do we reward our educators, I wonder? It's tough in these times to have acces to hi-quality education, at most levels, even within the specialty itself, never mind about the general public level!
For whoever is interested, there was a fairly complex article in one of the more recent APA "green" journals about the "philosophy of psychiatry", by Dr. Kenneth Kendler, "Towards a Philosophical Structure of Psychiatry"
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/162/3/433
Here is the introduction:
"This article, which seeks to sketch a coherent conceptual and philosophical framework for psychiatry, confronts two major questions: how do mind and brain interrelate, and how can we integrate the multiple explanatory perspectives of psychiatric illness? Eight propositions are proposed and defended: 1) psychiatry is irrevocably grounded in mental, first-person experiences; 2) Cartesian substance dualism is false; 3) epiphenomenalism is false; 4) both brainmind and mindbrain causality are real; 5) psychiatric disorders are etiologically complex, and no more "spirochete-like" discoveries will be made that explain their origins in simple terms; 6) explanatory pluralism is preferable to monistic explanatory approaches, especially biological reductionism; 7) psychiatry must move beyond a prescientific "battle of paradigms" to embrace complexity and support empirically rigorous and pluralistic explanatory models; 8) psychiatry should strive for "patchy reductionism" with the goal of "piecemeal integration" in trying to explain complex etiological pathways to illness bit by bit. "
