INVITED EDITORIAL
A fruitful meeting ground
Cláudio Laks Eizirik
Associate professor, Department of Psychiatry and Legal Medicine, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. Member and training analyst, Sociedade Psicanalítica de Porto Alegre. Former editor, Rev Psiquiatr RS.
"After some years of silence, a new psychiatry journal is created in our state. Based on the experience acquired in the last few issues of Revista de Psiquiatria Dinâmica, the last psychiatry journal that has been published locally, some of the members of its editorial board, together with new colleagues and stimulated by the support of the board of directors of Sociedade de Psiquiatria do Rio Grande do Sul, decided to face the challenge of publishing a psychiatry journal."
With these words I started the editorial of the first issue of our journal. Next, I conveyed the hope of seeing such attempt as something fruitful, and, later on, I explained the reason for a thematic issue on "Family and mental health." I also added that it was also related to what "maybe in the past could be called the psychiatric family of Rio Grande do Sul. Even accepting the dynamic and widely multiplying characteristics of the family, and the inevitable fragmentations and conflicts resulting from it, the aim of Revista de Psiquiatria is to be a scientific meeting ground, where observations, experiences and doubts created by our specialty can be exposed and debated considering their multiple aspects."
A few days ago, when I was invited by Paulo Oscar Teitelbaum to contribute an editorial in honor of the 30 years of our journal, I not only started browsing past and more recent issues of it but I also recalled countless people, situations, places, feelings and ideas.
In the 1970's, serving as secretary of Centro de Estudos Luis Guedes, I attended a meeting at the headquarters of Sociedade de Psiquiatria, which was located in a building on Salgado Filho Avenue at that time. During this meeting, Dr Marcelo Blaya, who was the director of Clínica Pinel, informed us that his clinic had decided to publish its own journal. Therefore, the agreement through which Revista de Psiquiatria Dinâmica was published by means of an association between Pinel, Centro de Estudos Luís Guedes and Sociedade de Psiquiatria would no longer be in effect. I was member of the editorial board of this journal by then. Some time later, the president of Sociedade de Psiquiatria, Dr Hans Ingomar Screen and his scientific secretary, Dr José Ricardo Pinto de Abreu, invited me to assume the position of first editor-in-chief of a new journal, which would be the official scientific publication of Sociedade de Psiquiatria do Rio Grande do Sul. We established the editorial board, which was constituted by Antonio Carlos Jardim Pires, Cláudio Maria da Silva Osório, Ivete Enk, José Ricardo Pinto de Abreu, Juarez Guedes Cruz and Maria Lucrecia Scherer Zavaschi, and we invited some of the most important psychiatrists at the time to be members of the advisory board. They were Drs Carlos Gari Faria, Darcy Abuchaim, David Zimmermann, Hans Schreen, Isaac Pechansky, Manoel Albuquerque, Milton Schansis, Odon Carneiro Monteiro and Roberto Pinto Ribeiro.
We started our work by meeting once a week. We planned, designed, discussed, created sections, shared opinions, collected studies. In short, we tried to give birth to a new being to which we gave our best ideas and hopes, assisted by the gentle and efficient presence of our secretary Dalva dos Anjos and the English expert, our colleague and friend, Cristina Heuser.
Thus, in March 1979, Revista de Psiquiatria do Rio Grande do Sul (RPRS) was launched, including several studies on family and mental health, a peculiar section of "test your knowledge," book reviews, news about scientific events, and a valuable lecture by professor Roberto Pinto Ribeiro about "psychiatry as a science," which was his speech as commencement speaker at the graduation ceremony of the 18th Class of Specialization in Psychiatry of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. I can clearly recall the moment when Roberto, using his usual oratory skills and intelligence, analyzed the topic suggested, defending a more strict scientific project for our specialty and concluding as follows: "recently, professor David Zimmermann, skillfully using the faulty importation to the sciences of health of Master's and PhD programs, is beginning, in collaboration with other professors, advanced studies in Psychiatry that might become the preliminary phase and source of raw material for the scientific project that I have just outlined. It might be that with this project, in the future, we will be able to improve the integration of the technical and scientific aspects. We might be able to increase the scientific quality of our participation in regional and national associations. And it is possible that respectable and regularly published psychiatry journals are launched, so that the Brazilian psychiatry will be able to actually intercommunicate its observations and experiences." After publishing some issues, I left the position of editor-in-chief of RPRS, which, since 1981 had the following editors-in-chief: Drs Ivete Enk, Aldo Luiz Coelho Borges Duarte, Luiz Carlos Mabilde, Jair Rodrigues Escobar, Jussara dal Zot, Sérgio Lewkowicz, José Carlos Calich, Edgar Diefenthaeler, Gisele Gus Manfro, César Brito, Jacó Zaslavsky, Flávio Schansis, Carmen Keidann and Paulo Oscar Teitelbaum.
However, I never fully stopped being involved in the activities related to the journal. Either as member of the advisory board, or participating in the well-organized scientific events, or even making suggestions or giving my opinion every time I was asked to, and whenever possible submitting manuscripts for publication, but mainly receiving, reading and keeping each issue in a special place in my library, because I care about this journal and feel proud of being part of its 30 years of history.
Our friend Roberto's predictions came true, and, throughout these 30 years, the several editors-in-chief and their colleagues improved, enlarged, qualified, enriched, diversified, and made our journal a national and international benchmark. Throughout these 30 years, the world, our city, our state and our country, psychiatry, our Sociedade de Psiquiatria, AMRIGS, all have significantly changed.
Browsing the issues that stack up now in front of me is like time traveling, since RPRS tells the history of our psychiatry, its fertile collaboration with psychoanalysis, the emergence of new techniques and approaches, the controversial issues discussed, the evolution of mental health care, the interviews with or studies conducted by the most relevant thinkers of our field of knowledge and its related fields, the advances of neurosciences, the book reviews that help to build the live thought of our field, the emergence and development of research in several different methods and versions, the evidence of the growth of our graduate programs, the predictions about further development, the new names, faces and ideas that came into view.
Actually, maybe above all, this is what should be celebrated on such an important date: what at that time I called the psychiatric family of Rio Grande do Sul has become larger, has diversified, has fragmented, has gone through painful separations, has sheltered opposite points-of-view, has witnessed separations, and reunions, losses, deaths, at the same time that it has welcomed new faces, renewed ideas, unexpected ways, and an admirable capacity to maintain, develop and broaden a legacy that keeps being fertilized with each issue. RPRS, therefore, shelters, integrates, contains different trends, areas, approaches, points-of-view, focuses, possibilities.
If I could talk to that former editor-in-chief of the first issue and his beloved friends who constituted the editorial board, I could tell them that this was, indeed, a fruitful meeting ground.
References
- 1. Eizirik C. Editorial. Rev Psiquiatr RS. 1979;1(1):2.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
24 Aug 2009 -
Date of issue
2009
