What's the Royal College of Psychiatrists really about?

The British Medical Journal this week (8 October 2011) includes advertisements from most Royal Colleges and Deaneries advertising recruitment into their specialty. Many include a brief description of the specialty. This is what the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych) says:

"Whether you are interested in hard-core neuroscience, the interface between science and the arts or simply want to know more about what makes people tick, training in psychiatry will take you into intellectual and personal places that no other specialty can."

It might seem worrying that the RCPsych is training people so that they can can better understand artistic representation of 'science', rather than focusing on the diagnosis, treatment, and management of mental illness. Similarly, the idea that training in psychiatry is about understanding "what makes people tick" is a bit like saying that cardiology is all about that thumpy-thumpy thing in peoples' chests. It's a glib simplification of the complexity of mental illness.

Perhaps, however, this is what the RCPsych sees itself doing. Not treating mental illness but ensuring that psychiatrists get to the cinema enough and taking them to all sorts of "personal places"; whatever that means. It certainly sees neuroscience as being "hard-core" rather than the substrate and mediator of all mental symptoms. The College has always been keen to hang on to 'good old' Cartesian dualism - it seems to shy away from the idea that psychiatrists might be treating brain disorders rather than 'getting to the root of the problem' or understanding "what makes people tick".

Unfortunately, in my experience many psychiatrists appear to lack both an understanding of neuroscience, psychopharmacology, and what 'makes people tick'.

If the College was really serious about recruiting the best candidates into a 21st Century specialty where the frontiers are about genetics, neurocircuitry, and modern imaging, it would embrace the concept that the brain is where it's at; rather than promoting a soft, fuzzy specialty which really wants people who like the cinema and have always wondered if Bollywood films are depicting mental illness accurately...