carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (03/18/86)
>I've read several indictments of psychiatry, no numbers, listing case >after case where misdiagnosis of physical diseases with weird >symptoms were dismissed as "hysteria", while the actual disease was >allowed to linger untreated. This has little to do with the efficacy of psychotherapy, which was the subject under discussion. You are talking about the accuracy of psychiatric diagnosis, which as you point out is less than 100%. Most therapists today are trained to be aware of the possibilities of somatic illness. If a patient presents with a limp, say, or severe headaches, few therapists would merely assume that the etiology is psychological, and any who did make this assumption would be considered incompetent by their peers. >To be fair, I agree that clinical psychology in general does more >good than harm like medicine in general, but psychology suffers from >having one all too convenient and sometimes dangerous diagnosis: it's >the patient's own fault, etc. I thought it was all the mother's fault. But no good therapist tries to assign blame for the patient's condition; that isn't constructive. In my opinion, what a therapist does, fundamentally, is to help the patient forgive herself for being a human being and accept responsibility for her own life. Friends can help sometimes, but it is a rare friend who has a therapist's skills developed through training and experience, and no friend has the emotional detachment from your life that is generally necessary for a clear, undistorted understanding of what is going on in your head. -- Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes