Psychiatry discontinued the term “organic” from the official nomenclature a couple of decades ago, but its significance is still relevant today because the care of patients with identifiable, acquired brain disease (such as epilepsy, movement disorders, and traumatic brain injury) requires the physician to have expertise, knowledge base, and a familiarity with assessment and treatment methods not usually required for patients with primary psychiatric disorders. Patients with organic psychiatric syndromes are common in clinical practice and are often difficult to manage for most general psychiatrists, even with consultation from other specialists who may themselves not be experts in the mental and emotional phenomena, which often accompany brain disease.

Neuropsychiatry is the psychiatric subspecialty that deals with the psychological and behavioral manifestations of brain disorders. Neuropsychiatry is, therefore, closely allied with cognitive and behavioral neurology–that is, the neurological specialty that focuses on psychological phenomena present in patients with brain disorders. In many ways, neuropsychiatry can offer a distinctive perspective on idiopathic psychiatric disorders; its limitations in this respect must also be noted. The limitations include consideration of the multifactorial nature of many psychiatric diseases–namely, interaction between environmental and genetic factors. To date, no psychiatric disorder has been completely mapped. The unraveling of a biological basis for many psychiatric diseases is a novel aspect of the field, which is in its inception phase.