APBP Article Oasis

Is Psychiatry Replacing Psychology?

Pharmaceuticals are big business. From the prominence of drug manufacturers in the stock market to the scores of prescriptions dealt each day by physicians across the nation, pharmaceuticals touch most Americans through illness, injury or enhancement. One area where the prescribing of drugs has seen major increases over the last several years can be found is in traditionally psychological treatment. From attention deficit disorder medications to selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, few problems associated with the mind are left to time or discussion.

Many problems associated with the mind can be better treated through medication, but not all problems benefit from their use. Still, the psychiatric community as a whole can’t be blamed entirely for the increase in prescriptions used to help with depression, anxiety and other illnesses. Pharmaceutical giants and the medical community as a whole have as much or more of responsibility for the change in practice.

Undoubtedly, depression is a medical illness that can have a crippling effect on certain individuals at various points in their lives. Of equal importance is the fact that almost everyone, for one reason or another, experiences depression at some juncture. When the medical establishment fails to distinguish between serious bouts of depression such as postpartum, debilitating, and suicidal depression with simple, everyday depression, patients are more likely to be unnecessarily medicated.

For their part, pharmaceutical companies have done their best to ensure that the public is more accepting of medication as the first line of treatment. Advertisements offer pills for every possible malady to an eager public, made even more eager by the promise of instant relief from whatever ails them. This is not only a problem with psychological based issues, but with medicine in general.

The tendency to over-prescribe antibiotics has resulted in new, resistant strains of life threatening bacteria. Even over the counter products unrelated to medicine have been created and marketed in an effort to play upon public fears for increased product sales. Antibacterial soap will stop the majority of germs that can cause illness, but so will the plain old soap people have been using for centuries before it.

Ultimately, it’s in the hands of the physician to make the right decision for their patient. Therapy patients who insist on being referred to a psychiatrist or related M.D. with the intent of being prescribed medication are entitled to as many opinions as they want, but until the psychiatric community as a whole becomes less willing to accommodate those who could be helped without medication yet still request it, the problem is only going to get worse.

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