Our great teacher [at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center], Elvin Semrad, actively discouraged us from reading psychiatry textbooks during our first year [of training]. Semrad did not want our perceptions of reality to become obscured by the pseudocertainties of psychiatric diagnoses.
I remember asking him once: “What would you call this patient — schizophrenic or schizoaffective?” He paused and stroked his chin, apparently deep in thought.
“I think I’d call him Michael McIntyre,” he replied.
from Van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.
Category: Assessment and Diagnosis
Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck on embracing multiple models of psychology
“So science seeks, as far as it might, to penetrate the mystery of the world. And ever so gradually scientists are beginning to become comfortable embracing multiple models. Physicists are no longer disheartened to look at light as both a particle and a wave. As for psychology, models abound: the biological, the psychological, the psychobiological, the sociological, the sociobiological, the Freudian, the rational-emotive, the behavioral, the existential, and so on.
“And while science needs those innovators who will champion a single new model as the most advanced understanding, the patient who seeks to be understood as wholly as possible would be well advised to seek a therapist capable of approaching the mystery of the human soul from all angles.”
— from People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil by M. Scott Peck, M.D.
Matthew M. Sholler, Psy.D. 
