Relevance of ethology to psychiatry.

Abstract

The interactions between ethology and psychiatry were reviewed. The ethological methods have provided more objective and theory-free observation techniques than the traditional psychiatric methods. The evolution-based ethological viewpoints afford some fundamentally new and more comprehensive approaches in understanding psychiatric conditions. The ethological theory has many concepts in common with various other schools of psychiatry, and thus is expected to act as a bridge to integrate them to lead to a more comprehensive psychiatric theory system. Ethology has not explored its potential in therapy, but may be useful, especially in terms of prevention and social psychiatry.