We've a wedding in the family this weekend so not much time for a detailed post. I did see this in Reuters this morning:
"More Americans with psychiatric conditions are being treated with drugs alone compared with a decade ago, while "talk therapy" -- either by itself or in combination with medication -- is on the decline, a new study finds.
The implications of the trend, as well as its underlying causes, are not fully clear, according to researchers. But they say the findings indicate that outpatient mental health care in the U.S. is being redefined.
The results, reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, are based on data from two government health surveys conducted in 1998 and 2007.
Over that period, the percentage of Americans who said they'd had at least one psychotherapy session in the past year remained steady -- at just over 3 percent in both 1998 and 2007.
However, among Americans receiving any outpatient mental health care, the proportion being treated with drugs alone rose from 44 percent in 1998 to 57 percent in 2007.
Meanwhile, combined treatment with drugs and psychotherapy declined from 40 percent to 32 percent, and the use of psychotherapy alone slipped from 16 percent in 1998 to about 10 percent in 2007."
This can't be surprising to anyone who has been watching trends over the last decade.Insurance companies prefer patients receive medication, which they can control, over psychotherapy, which is harder to control. Every day anyone who watches television or reads a mass market magazine encounters at least one and usually several ads for one or another of the heavily advertised antidepressants or atypical antipsychotics. And nowhere in any of those ads is it even suggested that the combination of psychotherapy and medication has been shown again and again to be superior to medications alone. In fact there is no suggestion that depression or bi-polar disorder is anything other than a medical illness.
I have heard physicians say that they recommend therapy but patients do not want to take the time for it, that they prefer to take meds instead. Well, of course they do -- because that is what they are being taught to do.
There are no ads for psychotherapy. No public service announcements about the value of talking to another human being as a way to deal with depression or other emotional ills. The only advocates for the value of psychotherapy are psychotherapists and our voice is way too muted to be heard over the din of the psychopharmacological messages.
I have no idea what the answer to this is. Do you?