An image-bank of mental illness. The psychiatrist enters the scene.

Teaching psychiatry is notoriously surrounded with numerous problems, includine problems connected with evaluation criteria and relational problems, not to mention those of a practical nature. The teacher must describe feelings, thoughts, and behaviours, must represent expressions and their shades of meaning in words, describe the manifestations of mental disorders and their contingent variations. Frequently this comes about not only to the detriment of completeness, but also leaves considerable room for a failure to understand, and for interpretations that are frequently infl uenced by subjective experiences. On the other hand, to learn directly on the patient, as is widely employed in other clinical disciplines, is a particularly delicate procedure in psychiatry, as it entails problems of privacy, of effective informed consent, and of ethics. In parallel it is understandably extremely diffi cult for the patient to demonstrate here and now his or her symptoms, so that the request to “show” onlookers his or her disorder rarely produces the desired result. Scholars of the theories of psychodynamics are well aware that the psychic functioning of a subject who is “exposed” to an audience, and thus also the symptoms that he or she manifests, are very different from what they would be in conditions of greater privacy. Lastly, pharmacological therapy changes the expression of a mental illness, and however benefi cial its effects, the result cannot be held to be the natural expression of that illness.