Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities. The term was first coined by the German physician Johann Christian Reil in 1808, and literally means the 'medical treatment of the mind' (psych-: mind; from Ancient Greek psykhē: soul; -iatry: medical treatment; from Gk. iātrikos: medical, iāsthai: to heal). A medical doctor specializing in psychiatry is a psychiatrist.

Psychiatric assessment typically starts with a mental status examination and the compilation of a case history. Psychological tests and physical examinations may be conducted, including on occasion the use of neuroimaging or other neurophysiological techniques. Mental disorders are diagnosed in accordance with criteria listed in diagnostic manuals such as the widely used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), edited and used by the World Health Organization. The fifth edition of the DSM (DSM-5) is scheduled to be published in 2013, and its development is expected to be of significant interest to many medical fields.

Daniel Carlat, M.D. is a psychiatrist in the United States. He has a private practice in Newburyport, MA and is on the faculty of Tufts Medical School. He is the author of the book Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry, which criticizes the field of psychiatry for abandoning its roots in talk therapy in favor of medication-based treatment. He is the founder and editor of a monthly newsletter called The Carlat Psychiatry Report, "a peer-reviewed, non-industry biased, CME publication."

Carlat graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983 and received his medical degree at the University of California, San Francisco. He completed his residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1992-1995 and went on to serve as chief resident of the MGH inpatient psychiatry unit in 1995.

Carlat has argued that psychiatry has been inconclusive about how and why it works: "We don't have any direct evidence that depression or anxiety or any psychiatric disorder is due to a deficiency in serotonin because it's very hard to actually measure serotonin from a living brain. Any efforts that have been made to measure serotonin indirectly — such as measuring it in the spinal fluid or doing post-mortem studies — have been inconclusive. They have not shown conclusively that there is either too little or too much serotonin in the fluids. So that's where we are with psychiatry. ... In cardiology, we have a good understanding of how the heart pumps, what electrical signals generate electricity in the heart. And due to that understanding, we can then target specific cardiac medications to treat problems like heart failure or heart attacks.... not perfect, but pretty well worked out."

Peter Roger Breggin (born May 11, 1936) is an American psychiatrist and critic of biological psychiatry and psychiatric medication. In his books, he advocates replacing psychiatry's use of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy with humanistic approaches, such as psychotherapy, education, and broader human services.

Breggin is the author of several books which are critical of modern psychiatry, including Toxic Psychiatry, Talking Back to Prozac and Talking Back to Ritalin. His most recent book, Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, discusses medication spellbinding (in which patients who are doing worse after treatment fail to see that they are doing worse or recognize why), the adverse effects of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), the hazards of diagnosing and medicating children, the psychopharmaceutical complex, and guidelines for psychotherapy and counseling.

Breggin now lives in the Finger Lakes Region of Central New York and practices psychiatry in Ithaca, New York.

Breggin graduated from Harvard College with honors, and attended Case Western Reserve Medical School. His postgraduate training in psychiatry began with an internship year of mixed medicine and psychiatry at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse. Breggin completed a first year of psychiatric residency at Harvard's Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston, where he was a teaching fellow at Harvard Medical School, and finished his final two years of psychiatric residency at SUNY. This was followed by a two-year staff appointment to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), where he worked to build and staff mental health centers and education. Breggin has taught at several universities, obtaining faculty appointments to the Washington School of Psychiatry, the Johns Hopkins University Department of Counseling, and the George Mason University Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. Breggin has worked in a private practice since 1968.

The Reign of Terror (5 September 1793 – 28 July 1794) (the latter is date 10 Thermidor, year II of the French Revolutionary Calendar), also known simply as The Terror (French: la Terreur), was a period of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by conflict between rival political factions, the Girondins and the Jacobins, and marked by mass executions of "enemies of the revolution." The death toll ranged in the tens of thousands, with 16,594 executed by guillotine (2,639 in Paris), and another 25,000 in summary executions across France.

The guillotine (called the "National Razor") became the symbol of the revolutionary cause, strengthened by a string of executions: Marie Antoinette, King Louis XVI, the Girondins, Philippe Égalité (Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans) and Madame Roland, as well as many others, such as pioneering chemist Antoine Lavoisier, lost their lives under its blade. During 1794, revolutionary France was beset with conspiracies by internal and foreign enemies. Within France, the revolution was opposed by the French nobility, which had lost its inherited privileges. The Roman Catholic Church was generally against the Revolution, which had turned the clergy into employees of the state and required they take an oath of loyalty to the nation (through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy). In addition, the First French Republic was engaged in a series of wars with neighboring powers intent on crushing the revolution to prevent its spread.