The monograph critically discusses the main problems of general psychiatry, which is absent in most psychiatry guidelines: the subject of psychiatry, relationships with other sciences and professions, interdisciplinarity. It has been shown that the main method of clinical psychiatry - a phenomenological (and not natural-scientific) description of direct communication with a mentally ill person and the reconstruction of his medical history - is the most difficult, since it requires a high level of critical reflection, integration of phenomenological and inductive units of analysis and consideration in various dimensions. The modern classification of mental disorders and its development are discussed.