Psychiatry is the medical

Medicine

Medicine is the science and art of healing. It encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....

 specialty

Specialty (medicine)

A specialty in medicine is a branch of medical science. After completing medical school, physicians or surgeons usually further their medical education in a specific specialty of medicine by completing a multiple year residency to become a medical specialist.-History of medical specialization:To...

 devoted to the study

Biomedical research

Biomedical research , in general simply known as medical research, is the basic research, applied research, or translational research conducted to aid and support the body of knowledge in the field of medicine...

 and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective

Affect (psychology)

Affect refers to the experience of feeling or emotion. Affect is a key part of the process of an organism's interaction with stimuli. The word also refers sometimes to affect display, which is "a facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect" .The affective domain...

, behavioural, cognitive

Cognition

In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...

 and perceptual

Perception

Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...

 abnormalities

Abnormality (behavior)

Abnormality, in the vivid sense of something deviating from the normal or differing from the typical , is a subjectively defined behavioral characteristic, assigned to those with rare or dysfunctional conditions...

. The term was first coined by the German physician

Physician

A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...

 Johann Christian Reil

Johann Christian Reil

Johann Christian Reil was a German physician, physiologist, anatomist and psychiatrist. He coined the term psychiatry or, in German, Psychiatrie in 1808....

 in 1808, and literally means the 'medical treatment of the mind' (psych-: mind; from Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

 psykhē: soul; -iatry: medical treatment; from Gk. iātrikos: medical, iāsthai: to heal).