Despite a trend that started as early as the late 1980s, Gardiner Harris writing in The New York Times yesterday seems to bemoan the fact that most psychiatrists don’t practice psychotherapy any longer.
Perhaps Harris should have interviewed Dr. Danny Carlat, who nearly a year ago wrote about his experiences as a modern psychiatrist (in the The New York Times Magazine, no less). Psychiatrists nowadays are generally poorly trained in psychotherapy, so they spend most of their time prescribing psychiatric medications. (Dr. Carlat’s book, Unhinged is well worth the read for further background about modern psychiatry.)
So I wasn’t sure why I was reading this in the “Money and Policy” section of the Times. Surely it’s not news that psychiatry is no longer practicing much psychotherapy — and hasn’t been doing so for decades. What’s the story here?
It appears to really just be a lifestyle piece about Dr. Levin, a practicing psychiatrist who has had to switch gears mid-career from a psychiatrist who was doing a fair amount of psychotherapy earlier in his career, to one who does nothing but medication prescriptions.