Psychiatry Exposed

[Nine]

Definitely. General practitioners are woefully unprepared to deal with mental illness - and the only tools at their disposal is the RX pad and the referral.

Therapy is effective. Therapy is also expensive, and difficult (for the patient, particularly).

A large part of the problem is the system, as you noted. I have no idea what it's like in the UK where you live, but I do know what it's like here, and it sounds like we have similar models.

Yeah, same deal more or less. GP's can prescribe basic anti-depressants and put you on a multi year long waiting list for a specialist.. Private specialists are few and far between and usually expensive.

One other leg of the problem is the patients - who doesn't want a quick cure-all pill that's cheap and easy, instead of having to go through all that hard therapy?

I imagine most have no idea about what they actually get from therapy either. It doesn't help here that you can wait 2-3 years to get to see a therapist even then you might only have 6 weekly sessions or something.

We're probably more on the same page than first glance might suggest. :p

You're absolutely right regarding treating "run-of-the mill" depression (though I hate characterizing it as that, I don't want to diminish anyone's experience with mental illness - but we do need to distinguish acute typical cases from the chronic difficult profound cases, they are *very different*). Many if not most in the former category will benefit *most* from behavioral therapy, and may not need meds at all, or just for a short time.

Sadly, the common approach is to have the GP just throw pills at the problem.

I think we are on the same page. I'm not sure how clear I was in my first post. I got wall of text carries away.

I think the worst thing about acute issues is most can be dealt with for good if sorted quickly with few if any meds. Like any wound not treating it quickly and correctly is just inevitably going to make things worse.