[Mental illness--problems with definition, diagnosis and legal regulations].

The analysis of literature and events in psychiatry in the course of past centurie show that the term mental illness even though it had played a positive role in the development of knowledge of psychic disorders and the place of psychiatry as part of clinical medicine has become an anachronic term in time. Because its content and form were never precisely defined, it began to serve as a means of hiding the lack of knowledge of the causes of mental disorders It was abused against its initial aim, e.g.

[Current problems in psychiatric health care in Poland (2005)].

The paper is a presentation of the most important and actual psychiatric health care problems in Poland: the financial situation of hospitals, the risk faced by the out-patient psychiatric care,ethical problems related to clinical practice, as well as issues on postgraduate education.

[Current problems in psychiatric health care in Poland (2004)].

The paper is a presentation of the most important and actual psychiatric health care problems in Poland: the financial situation of hospitals, the risk faced by the out-patient psychiatric care and the ethical problems related to investigations of psychotropic drugs.

[Methodologic problems of clinical investigations of antidepressants].

This paper discusses actual, often controversial, problems related to clinical investigations of antidepressants. Such problems include: inclusion and exclusion criteria (the investigated groups of patients are not representative for the population of depressed patients treated by psychiatrists), criteria of results' evaluation (50% reduction of pre-treatment number of points in the scale for measuring of depression severity is not satisfactory from a clinical point of view, this criterion could be replaced by remission), duration of treatment (4-6 weeks observation period is too short for adequate evaluation of treatment effects). The problem of using placebo is controversial from an ethical and legal point of view.