PSYCHIATRY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does psychiatry mean? 

• PSYCHIATRY (noun)
  The noun PSYCHIATRY has 1 sense:

1. the branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders

  Familiarity information: PSYCHIATRY used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PSYCHIATRY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Synonyms:

psychiatry; psychological medicine; psychopathology

Hypernyms ("psychiatry" is a kind of...):

medical specialty; medicine (the branches of medical science that deal with nonsurgical techniques)

Domain member category:

major depressive episode ((psychiatry) a state of depression with all the classic symptoms (anhedonia and lethargy and sleep disturbance and despondency and morbid thoughts and feelings of worthlessness and sometimes attempted suicide) but with no known organic dysfunction)

projection ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism by which your own traits and emotions are attributed to someone else)

rationalisation; rationalization ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism by which your true motivation is concealed by explaining your actions and feelings in a way that is not threatening)

reaction formation ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism in which a person unconsciously develops attitudes and behavior that are the opposite of unacceptable repressed desires and impulses and serve to conceal them)

regression ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism in which you flee from reality by assuming a more infantile state)

repression ((psychiatry) the classical defense mechanism that protects you from impulses or ideas that would cause anxiety by preventing them from becoming conscious)

anorexia nervosa ((psychiatry) a psychological disorder characterized by somatic delusions that you are too fat despite being emaciated)

disturbance; folie; mental disorder; mental disturbance; psychological disorder ((psychiatry) a psychological disorder of thought or emotion; a more neutral term than mental illness)

anxiety; anxiousness ((psychiatry) a relatively permanent state of worry and nervousness occurring in a variety of mental disorders, usually accompanied by compulsive behavior or attacks of panic)

intellectualisation; intellectualization ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism that uses reasoning to block out emotional stress and conflict)

repress; suppress (put out of one's consciousness)

analyse; analyze; psychoanalyse; psychoanalyze (subject to psychoanalytic treatment)

confabulate (unconsciously replace fact with fantasy in one's memory)

expansive (marked by exaggerated feelings of euphoria and delusions of grandeur)

overcompensation ((psychiatry) an attempt to overcome a real or imagined defect or unwanted trait by overly exaggerating its opposite)

isolation ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism in which memory of an unacceptable act or impulse is separated from the emotion originally associated with it)

echolalia ((psychiatry) mechanical and meaningless repetition of the words of another person (as in schizophrenia))

idealisation; idealization ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism that splits something you are ambivalent about into two representations--one good and one bad)

displacement ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism that transfers affect or reaction from the original object to some more acceptable one)

denial ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism that denies painful thoughts)

defence; defence mechanism; defence reaction; defense; defense mechanism; defense reaction ((psychiatry) an unconscious process that tries to reduce the anxiety associated with instinctive desires)

conversion ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism represses emotional conflicts which are then converted into physical symptoms that have no organic basis)

compensation ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism that conceals your undesirable shortcomings by exaggerating desirable behaviors)

acting out ((psychiatry) the display of previously inhibited emotions (often in actions rather than words); considered to be healthy and therapeutic)

confabulation ((psychiatry) a plausible but imagined memory that fills in gaps in what is remembered)

autism ((psychiatry) an abnormal absorption with the self; marked by communication disorders and short attention span and inability to treat others as people)

paramnesia ((psychiatry) a disorder of memory in which dreams or fantasies are confused with reality)

resistance ((psychiatry) an unwillingness to bring repressed feelings into conscious awareness)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "psychiatry"):

alienism (an obsolete term for the study and treatment of mental illness)

mental hygiene; psychotherapeutics; psychotherapy (the branch of psychiatry concerned with psychological methods)

Derivation:

psychiatric; psychiatrical (relating to or used in or engaged in the practice of psychiatry)

psychiatrist (a physician who specializes in psychiatry)

 Context examples 

In psychiatry, a state in which a person is unable or unwilling to see the truth or reality about an issue or situation.

(Denial, NCI Dictionary)

Psychiatry has been called an art rather than a science because there are no tests to tell doctors which antidepressants will be effective in patients.

(Anti-inflammatory Drugs Also Fight Depression, Voanews)

In psychiatry, the use of hydrazine derivatives is limited due to the emergence of the tricyclic antidepressants.

(Hydrazine, NCI Thesaurus)

A subdiscipline of psychiatry that is concerned with the study of conditioning, learning, perception, motivation, emotion, language, and thinking; also used in relation to subject-matter areas in which experimental methods are emphasized.

(Experimental Psychiatry, NCI Thesaurus)

In the future, the understanding of this interaction between two brains would allow for the comprehension and analysis of very complex aspects of the fields of psychology, sociology, psychiatry, or education, using the neural images within an ecological or real-world context.

(Our Brains Synchronize during A Conversation, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

Each time we exercise, we are truly doing something good for our body on many levels, including at the immune cell level, study researcher Suzi Hong, a researcher of psychiatry and family medicine at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, said in a statement.

(Just 20 Minutes of Walking May Reduce Inflammation in Your Body, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

Depression affects at least one in six of us at some point in our lifetime, and better treatments are urgently needed, said senior author Abraham Palmer, PhD, professor of psychiatry and vice chair for basic research at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

(New Method for Treating Depression, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

But Golam Khandaker, professor of psychiatry at the University of Cambridge in England, says too much inflammation is harmful.

(Anti-inflammatory Drugs Also Fight Depression, Voanews)