Richard Perry/The New York Times “I had to train myself not to get too interested in their problems and not to get sidetracked trying to be a semi-therapist,” said Dr. Donald Levin, a psychiatrist whose practice no longer includes talk therapy.Psychiatrists are talking less and prescribing more. Many of the nation’s 48,000 psychiatrists no longer provide talk therapy, the form of psychiatry popularized by Freud that has been a mainstay of psychiatry for decades, writes Gardiner Harris in Sunday’s New York Times. Instead, they typically prescribe medication, usually after a brief consultation with each patient.
The switch from talk therapy to medications has swept psychiatric practices and hospitals, leaving many older psychiatrists feeling unhappy and inadequate. A 2005 government survey found that just 11 percent of psychiatrists provided talk therapy to all patients, a share that had been falling for years and has most likely fallen more since. Psychiatric hospitals that once offered patients months of talk therapy now discharge them within days with only pills.
To learn more about the fundamental shifts in psychiatric care, read the full article, “Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy,” and then please join the discussion below.
