Psychiatry and the future: Expertise, Artificial Intelligence, and emerging technologies

Psychiatry has long felt itself to be under threat. The authors examine how the perception of threats to psychiatry has evolved over the last 35 years, as exemplified in papers from 1990 and 2011, and how recent development is linked to the current concerns about overmedicalisation and overdiagnosis in medicine and psychiatry. They examine this in the context of the developing technologies and cultures of information and artificial intelligence. They argue that, while psychiatry has always understood the workings of the mind through contemporary social, cultural and technological constructs, and always understood the mind to be embodied by the brain, the task of reaching a diagnosis remains difficult, vital and central to the question of the future of psychiatry.