This, the second Alumni meeting of 2022, took place on 23 June 2022 in the RCH Foundation Fund Raising space at 48 Flemington Rd. The meeting started at 12.10 pm.
Psychiatry – Is the glass half full or half empty?
Prof Sidney Bloch spoke to an audience of 21 Alumni members and guests and was introduced by the Alumni President, Jim Wilkinson, who started by welcoming the audience to the first face to face Alumni lunch for more than two years. He noted that Professor Bloch had grown up in South Africa under the Apartheid System, which he loathed but felt helpless about changing. He had “survived morally” while at medical school by volunteering in mission hospitals where tolerance and inclusion prevailed. After graduating from the University of Cape Town in 1964 and doing his internship in Israel, he came to Melbourne to train in psychiatry. He had considered paediatrics and even applied for a junior registrar job at the RCH. The letter of “we regret to inform you” was followed the next day by one from the Royal Melbourne congratulating him on getting a position in psychiatry. His fate was sealed. While at the RMH he also obtained a PhD in medical psychology from the University of Melbourne. A Harkness Fellowship then took him to Stanford University to further his training. Thereafter, he worked as a consultant psychiatrist in Oxford for 13 years before returning to Melbourne in 1990 to take up an academic appointment in the University of Melbourne based at St. Vincent’s. He was appointed Emeritus Professor upon his retirement but has continued to teach and write.
While mental illness was recognised in ancient Greece and Rome and was the object of scientific speculation, it was only in the late 18 Century that psychiatry became a medical discipline. Notwithstanding, the concept of mental illness remained poorly understood. As late as the Victorian era, terms like insanity and lunacy were used loosely and indiscriminately. Emil Kraepelin’s pioneering observations at that time led to the distinction between “Dementia Praecox” (later renamed schizophrenia) and “Manic-Depressive Insanity” (now called bipolar disorder). Many other conditions have been differentiated since then, but we are still not certain about how valid most of them are as clinical entities. Autism is a good example. Although first described 80 years ago, it is still not clearly understood.
Lack of scientific evidence about the cause of many psychiatric disorders, including autism, bedevils the field; the same limitations affect determining what forms of treatment are likely to be of benefit.
On the other hand, the advent of genomics and sophisticated neuroimaging techniques has led to exciting research on the underlying pathogenesis of many disorders. An example in the field of autism is the Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium which is looking for risk loci in very large samples.
At the end of his talk, Sidney invited the audience to vote on the question he had posed in the title “Psychiatry – Is the glass half full or half empty?”
It was probably a reflection of his optimism that advances were being made in the neuroscientific understanding of mental illnesses and psychological treatments had progressed substantially that the vote fell in favour of the “half full” response.
A lively discussion was followed by Lunch and the meeting concluded at 1.15 pm.
The talk was recorded by Rob Grant from Creative Studio and the recording can be viewed at the link shown here:
Prof Sid Bloch – Psychiatry. Is the glass Half Full or Half Empty?