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EDITORIAL
Time and psychiatry: 70 years of APRS
Flávio Shansis; Paulo Oscar Teitelbaum
Editors, Rev Psiquiatr RS.
Life is some duties we brought home.
When you realize it, it's already 6 o'clock: there's time
When you realize it, it's already Friday
When you realize it, it's been 60 years
Now it's too late to be condemned
And if - one day- I was given another opportunity,
I wouldn't even look at the clock.
I'd just go straight on, always.
And I'd throw away along the path the golden and useless skin of hours.
(Mario Quintana, Esconderijos do tempo)
The issue of time has filled human's mind since we were given the faculty of thinking. Of thinking and rethinking. Immediately, the notion of time led to another: the notion of mortality. Psychiatry, by dealing with humans, also deals with time.
In this issue of our journal, we decided to purposely approach this theme. It is not by chance that it is present on the cover of this issue, represented by the work "Time" by Laura Castilhos, a fine artist from the State of Rio Grande do Sul. We chose this issue after thinking about our clinical practice and associative life.
In psychiatric practice, time is perceived in multiple ways. From a clinical perspective, medicine pioneers already perceived the notion of time, by valuing the need of observing the development of signs and symptoms that eventually manifested as a syndrome and later as a disease.
In clinical psychiatry, crucial works by scholars such as Emil Kraepelin have described the importance of a longitudinal evaluation of patients, their premorbid behaviors, prodromes of diseases and finally the consolidation of a complete morbid situation. Such notion of time, necessary in order to reach a more accurate conclusion about a patient, still remains essential - despite all the pressure by current diagnostic manuals to value a cross-sectional diagnosis, as a snapshot of a moment that often tells us little about the evolution of a given disorder.
In psychoanalytic practice, time is the path through which the therapeutic pair moves, aiming to reach knowledge, understanding and thus providing the patient with the possibility of reaching better "psychic places" in which to live, through possible elaborations of conflicts set in the past, but updated and active in the present.
Time surprises us in associative life as well. When we realize it, almost a century has passed, and this is a lot, especially in a country as young as ours, in the so-called "new world." The institution to which our journal is the official publication, Associação de Psiquiatria do Rio Grande do Sul (APRS), celebrates 70 years of existence. It figures as a respectable lady, with its own history and time. Our journal was born later, when APRS was already 40 years old, mature enough to feel the need of creating a channel of development and dissemination of the psychiatric knowledge produced by it.
That date is a landmark for all APRS members. We also feel more mature and, perhaps for that reason, more able to understand time and its imperative limitation. Throughout almost 30 years of uninterrupted publication, Revista de Psiquiatria do Rio Grande do Sul has sheltered the scientific production of many APRS members, many of which have already fulfilled their vital cycle and left us. However, their ideas remain, overcoming the imperative limitation of time, kept alive in the memory of our institution, registered on the pages of our journal. This is the case, for example, of Dr. Cyro Martins, whose birth centenary is celebrated in 2008 by the creation of an award with his name by APRS, aimed to encourage the scientific production of young psychiatrists.
Revista de Psiquiatria do Rio Grande do Sul celebrates the longevity of the institution to which it belongs and is proud to have contributed throughout this history as an expression channel of its scientific capacities.
Emphasizing time in the present issue - on the cover and in this editorial - is the form by which we have decided to pay homage to the 70 years of APRS and its members, professionals that deal with human beings and with the way in which time affects them.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
06 Jan 2009 -
Date of issue
Aug 2008
