Meyerian history and examination in psychiatry

I mentioned the article about One hundred years of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins in my previous post. The article focuses on how Adolf Meyer developed an organised approach for history taking and mental state examination in psychiatry, which became standard in the US. It was taken over by the Maudsley Hospital in the UK, again becoming standard (see previous post and my review of most recent edition of The Maudsley handbook of practical psychiatry). However, as the article points out, the "meyerian history and examination ... is little used in the United States today as it is often judged to be too time-consuming".

The clinican comes to a formulation at the end of the history and examination, of which a differential psychiatric diagnosis is merely one element. Some may see formulation as more opposed to psychiatric diagnosis (see previous post), but formulation should, as the article says, summarise "the story focusing on the salience of the problems and context - how has the problem developed, interrupted, and/or distorted the patient's life trajectory".

The article discusses why psychiatry does not focus on the meyerian history and examination in a comprehensive and systematic way, and is, therefore, not as patient-centred as it should be (see previous post). One reason is that too many influential psychiatrists are research-based, rather than being involved in routine clinical care settings. Today's medicine doesn't teach a broad enough basis "for knowing our patients and partnering with them in patient care". Meyer made these methods explicit. This is a "truly personalized medicine, distinct from the ongoing extension of the disease model at a molecular level, which is commonly referred to as individualised or precision medicine" (see eg. previous posts The gap between neural circuits and understanding people and Psychiatric research folly).