Excellent post by Dr. Sheurich, Interesting Times for Psychiatrists.
Yes. It used to be that Psychiatrists were the only ones who would talk to a distressed person with some depth of understanding. Nowadays, everybody can be a "therapist," and the "New, Improved" Psychiatrists don't want to get to know who you are. They want a symptom for the right pill.
I'm with 1 Boring Old Man:
I kept going on doing what I knew how to do anyway – just kept "doing what I did before and what I loved." I was a late arriver, having had another career first, so I was never around for the days of wine and roses to "go backwards, moneywise, in [my] career." I’m retired with "the lifestyle that my wife and I have been living for the last 40 years." I live in a log cabin. We travel and buy the things we want. It was a modest life with a modest retirement. I wouldn’t have had it be much different. I get calls from Therapist friends often who want me to help them find a "good Psychiatrist" who will do their "meds." I don’t even know what to say. Good Psychiatrists don’t "do meds," they treat people.
In my view, all docs should treat people, not diagnoses and not symptoms. People aren't "cases" - not even to good surgeons and anesthesiologists. No two "cases" are the same. Medicine is a humanistic, humanitarian art as much as it is science, and people are too complicated for simple formulations - unless they are bleeding out in the ER or some such. As I read the medical literature, most people don't even take their prescribed medicines.
I take note that the current head of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Carol Bernstein, has problems with the DSM model.
So do I. I have some hope for it too, but believe it to be of limited utility. It's largely pseudo-scientific, and pseudo-certain. "Sex Addiction"? Give me a break.
As 1 Boring Old Man says, "Don't mistake the pointing finger for the moon."
