Psychologists Offer Critiques On Critique Of Psychiatry

Two psychologists offered responses to yesterday's posting and commentary on Bruce Levine's bashing of the psychiatric profession.

First up is John Grohol of Psych Central.

"I feel profession bashing is too easy to do, and you have to take as good as you give. For instance, psychologists shouldn’t be proud of their own professional association’s tortured stance on, well, torture, flip-flopping like a fish out of water over the past year. Which has been heatedly opposed by many of its own members (resulting in Sharon Brehm’s (PDF) and Beth Shinn’s resignations, among many others).

"Nor should they be proud of their continued push away from their roots in psychology and behavior to wanting to prescribe all those wonderful psychiatric medications. The same medications Bruce Levine says has corrupted the field of psychiatry.

"I hope he and other psychologists see the irony here, because we, as a profession, are sadly doomed to repeat the mistakes of other professions if we learn nothing from them."

Those are fabulous points. Like John, I am fairly dubious of psychologists and therapists prescribing meds. I'm sure they'd do no worse than psychiatrists and PCPs already are--and that's just the problem.

And Cheryl Fuller, who writes the excellent Jung At Heart blog (one of the best blog names ever) offered this in comments on this site:

"Levine's critique is good as far as it goes, but he seems to overlook some of the pressures within psychiatry to move so dramatically to a biological model. Surely the fact that they lost exclusive control over the therapy field as other disciplines such as psychology, social work, counseling and nursing developed license-eligible clinical training programs is a piece of it. Plus psychiatrists have been on the low end incomes for physicians. Other physicians have often viewed them as not "real" doctors. Likely these pressures laid the groundwork that Big Pharma has been so able to build on.

"And sadly, we psychologists are not innocents in all of this either. In our haste to make ourselves "scientists" we have become captive to outcomes studies, neuroscience and the like just as much as psychiatrists have been -- there's just not as much money in it for us as for them."

Great points by both, for which I thank them.