There have been times when psychiatrist-authors have made it seem that psychiatry was fated to have endless problems, challenges, and insults. It was almost as if immersion in problems and pain were likely to be an ongoing component of the life of anybody in this field.Perhaps it is hard to take success, but we are going to have to live with some of it. As I have illustrated, in the last 10 years psychiatry has:1. Decided it is part of medicine.2. Attracted more and better students.3. Matched increasing number of its resident spots.4. Certified more of its members.5. Entered into an era of increasing refinement and sharpening of its clinical practice.6. Strengthened the leadership of NIMH.7. Made the NIMH mission more correspondent to the concerns of academic psychiatry.8. Experienced a literal explosion in new approaches and information in psychiatric research.9. Had a remarkable record of major psychiatric awards and awards to sciencesrelated to psychiatry, including those to Sperry, Huebel and Weisel, Kandel, Sokoloff, Schou, Bunney, Egeland, Baron, etc.10. Experienced the development of an invigorated and charged citizen group advocating for many of the same concerns that psychiatrists do.11. Experienced an improvement in the research budget, the miracle of the Reagan administration supportingsome clinical training, and a remarkable improvement in reimbursement for psychiatric care through Medicare at a time of enormous fiscal concern in the country. This positive news accompanies the other trends moving toward:1. Subspecialization,2. Increased refinement,3. Dramatically increased repertoire of treatments,4. Increased technology,5. More challenging regulators, and6. More challenging and informed consumers. What I have said is that those concerned about education as a result will have to beconcerned about:1. Opportunities for those who want a special focus within general psychiatry.2. Developing an even fuller curriculum to review the enormous repertoire of research and clinical tools and treatments available.3. Ensuring that faculty is equipped to bring integration to the various lines of psychiatric research and clinical psychiatry.4. Teaching the new psychiatrist a genuinely creative approach which allows him or her to keep up-to-date with the likely continued evolution of the field.5. Educate and sensitize trainees to the more challenging nature of the consumer he or she will treat along with that consumer's family.6. Be more attentive to the need to document what we do in such a way as to be defensible to outside people who oversee our work.7. Emphasize the need for ethical and responsible physician behavior, whether it be in treating AIDS patients evenhandedly or in recognizing the destructive nature of acting out interpersonal relationships with patients or in trying to ensure that patients get the best possible treatment.8. And while doing all this, ensure that the fundamental interaction of psychology and biology stay as a critical part of the educational program of psychia trists.9. And ensure that whatever specialized area the psychiatrist selects that he or she has sufficient capacity to function as a general psychiatrist.I think we are in a remarkable phase in psychiatry. I have never seen more excitement in terms of knowledge development. It seems we are constantly striking new ground, looking at possible psychiatric treatments for cocaine abuse, localizing genes for multiple psychiatric disorders, developing more and more specialized treatments specific to selective disorders, gradually moving towards the likelihood of diagnostic tests which will offer a quantifiable complement to our clinical assessment techniques.For me 28 years ago the field that seemed most exciting was psychiatry. We did have a period in the 1970s of considerable pain and worry. I believe educators today have to take on the responsibility of retaining the fine qualities of psychiatry that have lasted for years and helping young students derive the maximum from the excitement of a field changing and dramatically increasing its ability to help. I believe we will remember the decades from the mid-1980s into the 21st century as the time when psychiatry came of age, was established as a solid and respected field within medicine, and dramatically augmented its ability to make a contribution to the alleviation of suffering.Abstract Teaser