Psychiatry
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is a medical field which aims to diagnose, treat, and prevent various mental illnesses, dealing with overall psychological and mental activities of human beings.
This deals with neurotic disorders like depression, anxiety disorders, panic disorders, and obsessive compulsive disorders, organic psychosis like dementia and mental problems after experiencing brain damage or cerebral diseases, developmental disorders for infants like autism, attention deficit disorders, hyperactive disorders, and learning disorders, and other problems regarding human behaviors like substance abuse (alcohol, marijuana, and narcotics).
Depression is a very common disease with a 10 to 15% prevalence rate over one’s lifetime, being a major psychiatric disease that may accompany suicide if acute. Depression can cause serious disorders that affect one’s social and occupational functions and personal relationships that would otherwise normally be in good shape. In this sense, depression should be approached with a precise diagnosis and appropriate treatment. Depending on the type of depression, the most appropriate biological and mental treatment is followed upon individuals. Upon the type and degree of depression, treatment under hospitalization can be conducted if necessary.
There are numerous problems during the childhood growth stage, such as disabilities of speaking meaningful words other than ‘mom’ and ‘dad’, banging one’s head on the wall when getting angry, biting fingernails, being afraid of sleeping alone, being inattentive while learning, having no friends, being addicted to the computer and TV, etc. Some of those symptoms can be normal behavior at a certain age while some of them can be abnormal. The Pediatrics and adolescent psychiatric clinic helps children sustain healthy mental development through professional analysis and diagnosis on various issues and also helps parents have more efficient conversations with their children.
The Dementia clinic performs diagnosis through detailed interviews over one’s medical history for symptoms, an objective analysis of the cognitive function of patients, checkup of functional conditions of patients in their daily lives, basic tests for physical abnormalities related to dementia, an MRI on the brain to check for encephalopathy, which can cause dementia, diagnosis of depression that is accompanied with dementia in many cases, etc. Dementia can be treated with medicinal therapy for improving cognitive functions, medicinal therapy for symptoms accompanied with dementia such as sleep disorder, depression, anxiety, hallucination, and delusion while short term hospitalization might be necessary for tests and treatment in some cases.