Guest Poster Dr. Maher on Dealing with Changes in Psychiatry Through the Years (But Especially Now)

Obviously, psychiatry has changed over time. We've gone from a field where treatment was mostly psychotherapy-- I'll purposely omit insulin shock, leeches, and lobotomy-- to one of symptoms, prescriptions, and side effects, as though these things occur outside of the context of a person's life.  Ah, you've heard merant before.  And like all of medicine, it's no longer just about treating patients, it's about checking the right boxes, coding what happened in the session by the minute, those damn CPT codes, and now about the technology and the hits your fees take if you won't e-prescribe, file PQRS (?huh) data, and practice the way the insurers want, if you choose to accept insurance or work for an agency that does.  With all that in mind, I saw this lovely and angsty post on Facebook, and asked the author to join Shrink Rap as a guest poster.  I was so pleased when Dr. Maher said yes.  Her guest post is below.------ I'll be 65 next month, I will have been in private practice for nearly 40 years, and I'm trying to decide where to go from here. If you have time, would you help me think through this difficult decision? I trained in a time and a place when psychiatric treatment, other than for the severe mental illnesses, was about psychoanalysis. Even if you didn't go on for analytic training (which I did, right after residency, at one of the most classical institutes in NYC), your primary goal was to search for and speak to the complex humanity of t...
Source: Shrink Rap - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Source Type: blogs