Psychiatry: all in the mind or all in the brain?

In his book review (Feb 21, p 621),¹ Athar Yawar makes a common distinction between interpersonal relational psychiatry (in his nice phrase “expert companionship”) and what he characterises as a reductive neuroscience linked implicitly to an uncompanionable manipulation of the neurochemical self. This is to default to the rhetoric of the past and to spurious distinctions that do indeed have a long history in the discipline but do not need now to be polarised in such a way.