Mass Extinction... So how do you feel about that?

 The drugging of America continues...  A long article from the NY Times, but worth reading.  They don't say it (institutional psychosis prevents them, I'm sure), but it's another example of how the government directed insurance market has destroyed a profession.

Well, it's psychiatry.  A sort of wanna-be profession.  But still.

It's even bigger than that, though.  The patient's own problems are so much about how the government schools, welfare and other policies has bred a populace ripe for chronic neurosis in need of therapy.  A symptom of a greater philosophical disease, of course.  But can a country survive for much longer like this???

Excerpts:

"...But the psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Levin, stopped him and said: “Hold it. I’m not your therapist. I could adjust your medications, but I don’t think that’s appropriate.”

I will be interjecting emphasis like that here and there.  Rather than swearing, that is.

"Like many of the nation’s 48,000 psychiatrists, Dr. Levin, in large part because of changes in how much insurance will pay, no longer provides talk therapy... Instead, he prescribes medication, usually after a brief consultation with each patient. So Dr. Levin sent the man away with a referral to a less costly therapist and a personal crisis unexplored and unresolved.

"...Dr. Levin, 68, first established a private practice in 1972, when talk therapy was in its heyday. Then, like many psychiatrists, he treated 50 to 60 patients in once- or twice-weekly talk-therapy sessions of 45 minutes each. Now, like many of his peers, he treats 1,200 people in mostly 15-minute visits for prescription adjustments that are sometimes months apart. Then, he knew his patients’ inner lives better than he knew his wife’s; now, he often cannot remember their names. Then, his goal was to help his patients become happy and fulfilled; now, it is just to keep them functional."

It's all so connected to the so-called ADHD "epidemic" and the goal of teachers, administrators, guidance "counselors" and parents who drug energetic children into passivity rather than treating the primary disease -- cognitive dismorphism built of anti-conceptual schooling and chronic, overwhelming boredom caused by it.

"Dr. Levin has found the transition difficult. He now resists helping patients to manage their lives better.  “I had to train myself not to get too interested in their problems,” he said, “and not to get sidetracked trying to be a semi-therapist.”

To grasp this one, try an analogy like, "I'm your doctor, I'm not trained  to get too interested in your injuries. I don't want to get side-tracked by healing you." 

Oh.  Wait.

...“I miss the mystery and intrigue of psychotherapy,” he said. “Now I feel like a good Volkswagen mechanic. I’m good at it,” Dr. Levin went on, “but there’s not a lot to master in medications."

I have to agree.  He's probably a good Volkswagon mechanic. Volk = "people".  Wagon= "bus them through".

"... A 2005 government survey found that just 11 percent of psychiatrists provided talk therapy to all patients..."

"...Recent studies suggest that talk therapy may be as good as or better than drugs in the treatment of depression ,"

Not so recent. At least 50 years. This has been known for decades. Aka, cognitive therapy.

"...but fewer than half of depressed patients now get such therapy compared with the vast majority 20 years ago. Insurance company reimbursement rates and policies that discourage talk therapy are part of the reason. A psychiatrist can earn $150 for three 15-minute medication visits compared with $90 for a 45-minute talk therapy session....

"...years ago, he often saw patients 10 or more times before arriving at a diagnosis. Now, he makes that decision in the first 45-minute visit. “You have to have a diagnosis to get paid,” he said with a shrug. “I play the game.”

Apparently not the 'game' of the Hippocratic Oath, however.  A game more like... tennis, perhaps.  They bounce into your office, and you bat them out with a prescription of Xanax or Ritalin. Game, set, match.