Freudian Falloff

Campus Report ^ | August 7, 2008 | Bethany Stotts

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Freudian Falloff

by: Bethany Stotts, August 07, 2008

Are Freudian analyses of the human mind becoming a thing of the past? A new study released this month finds that psychiatric practices are increasingly opting for medical therapies over the traditional “couch talks” that once symbolized this mental health profession.

Those consumers continuing to seek counseling are increasingly moving away from the psychiatry for counseling, preferring more non-medical approaches—partially because “managed care” such as HMO’s reimburse psychiatrists more for a 15 minute prescription session than for 45 minutes of psychotherapy.

Two researchers from Columbia University and Beth Israel Medical Center found the percentage of psychiatric visits involving “psychotherapy” declined from 44.4% to 28.9% between 1996 and 2005.

Those practices providing psychotherapy for all of their patients halved in the last ten years, from 19.1% in 1996-1997 to a mere 10.8% for the 2004-2005 period, the researchers point out in their study which appeared in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Psychotherapy in this case was defined by using the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) definition, as “treatments involving the intentional use of verbal techniques to explore or alter the patient’s emotional life in order to effect symptom reduction or behavior change.” Sessions were only considered psychotherapeutic if they were explicitly designated as such by the psychiatrist and lasted 30 minutes or more. The professors attributed changes in psychiatry to several trends within healthcare:

• ongoing managed care (HMO) incentives for medications rather than psychotherapy;
• demand “fostered by aggressive pharmaceutical campaigns;”
• “increased public awareness of common mental disorders;”
• the “availability of new medications with fewer address effects;” and
• “greater public receptivity toward mental health treatments.”...

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I read a Scifi story years ago — can’t remember the title - about the last psychiatrist in a city who was out of business after drugs had replaced psychotherapy for treating mental problems. Perhaps another Freeper can name it.