My father, God rest his soul, always told me that psychiatrists are among the most ignorant of doctors. When I asked him why, he told me that, although the range of illnesses, psychoses, and other ailments we attempt to treat are huge, virtually limitless in fact, the clinical and factual knowledge at our disposal is minute by comparison. We cannot for example, peer into the human psyche, we cannot understand how the thought processes of the human brain really work, or how it can be that one set of circumstances can lead one individual into, say, the deepest pit of trauma or depression, when the self same circumstances have no effect whatsoever on millions of other individuals. Psychiatry is not, and probably never will be an exact science. In most cases we treat, rather than cure the pati
