People don't talk about psychiatrists the way they talk about neurologists, dentists or vets. In fact, there are those who call psychiatry voodoo or pseudoscience; and, to be fair, the specialty does have a history of claims and practices that are now considered weird and destructive.
In Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman looks at the development of what he himself calls the most distrusted, feared and denigrated of all medical specialties. Lieberman is chairman of psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, chief psychiatrist at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital Columbia University Medical Center and former president of the American Psychiatric Association. He tells NPR's Scott Simon about why it took so long for psychiatry to establish itself as a science.
[For more of this story go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...s-psychiatrys-demons]
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