Dissecting through the Mind- The Art of History Taking in Psychiatry

History taking is an important aspect of teaching clinical skills in medicine during undergraduate and post-graduate courses. There is usually a uniformity as to how to take a reliable and informative history across various fields of medicine. Each subject, however has some specific questions pertaining to the subject which need to be addressed. History taking is given significantly much higher priority in the field of Psychiatry owing to lack of laboratory based diagnostic tools. Much of the diagnostic tools in Psychiatry are basically well structured, validated sets of questionnaires. Format of history taking remains somewhat similar in most of the literatures, but the individual skills to elicit history differs from person to person and no doubt it’s more of an art. This article aims to highlight the general format of history taking, the barriers in proper history taking, the situation specific skills, and overall art of extracting more and purposeful information from patients which can help reach the diagnosis.