What Ails Modern Psychiatry as Practiced

Definitely there is a need for psychiatrists to re-examine the way they approach mental illnesses and their treatment.

For that to happen, they have to be in dialogue with actual patients who have first-hand knowledge about mental illness and the effects the treatments have, etc., to better understand the mental illnesses.

The problem with modern psychiatry is that it operates on the physicalist model, equating and collapsing the mind onto the brain, and so the only fix they have for it are physical methods in preponderance, such as pills, ECT, etc., all of which act on the brain in a very physical manner.

To be sure, there are some methods like cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and Commitment therapy (ACT), which try to work on the mind itself rather than on the brain but they are given far lesser space and importance in the therapeutic approach by the psychiatrists because they are time-consuming and in the modern corporate setup driven by the need to pay attention to the bottom line, the psychiatrists resort to the quick-fix of slotting the patient into a specific diagnostic DSM category within 10 minutes and spend next 5 minutes writing out the prescription, and boom they are ready to see the next patient, thereby maximizing their incomes by “efficient” utilization of their time.

Psychiatry does try to advance the concept of the “bio-psycho-social” model, but majority of the attention is on the “bio” aspect (drugs, ECT, etc.), some on the “psycho” aspect (CBT, ACT, etc.), but hardly any attention is paid to the “social” component of the causative factors of mental illness.

If you ask for my opinion, I would say that the “bio” aspect is merely a symptom of what is happening at the level of interaction of the “psycho” with the “social”.

Hence, to root out the causes of the mental illness, one should not treat merely the “bio” aspects, which would be just symptomatic treatment without addressing the underlying causes, but rather one should actively pay attention to and address the maladies at the level of the psychic and social aspects of an individual’s life.

“Back to the PsychoSocial” should be the rallying cry to set things right in the field of modern psychiatry.