Talk Therapy Essay

The field of psychology has seen constant change and development since it first became recognized as a science at the end of the eighteen hundreds (Landrun, n.d). We have seen drastic changes from lobotomies, electric shock therapy and locking people up in asylums to the modern treatment of cognitive behavioural therapy and the use of psychotropic medications and even now the trends in psychology are changing. Usually changes seem to be made to improve the practice; however this current trend is moving psychiatry away from talk therapy and towards just using medication to treat psychological issues and is being driven more by corporate greed than concern for the wellbeing of people.
One of the most influential drives that is pushing the use of cognitive behavioural therapy (or talk therapy) is the cost. Most insurance companies will cover the majority of medication costs but not cover talk therapy. Where it used to be common for psychiatrists to treat an average

The problem is that a diagnosis is often dependant on the patient understanding their symptoms, but without the proper training they can often be misleading. For instance one psychiatrists told a story about a patient who came in with complaints of ADD (attention deficit disorder), so for the remainder of the appointment the questions centered around attention deficit disorder and it wasn’t until a comment made by the patient at the end did the psychiatrist realize that his patient could be dealing with an anxiety disorder as opposed to ADD (Harris, 2011). Since psychiatrists often only see their patients once for forty five minutes it makes it much easier to misdiagnose their symptoms than it would be if they were meeting regularly for talk