Did big pharma basicaly ruin psychiatry ?

“We have become obsessed with psychopharmacology and its endless process of tinkering with medications, adjusting dosages, and piling on more medications to treat the side effects of the drugs we started with,” he says. “We have convinced ourselves that we have developed cures for mental illnesses … when in fact we know so little about the underlying neurobiology of their causes that our treatments are often a series of trials and errors.”

Back in December 2003, a study in Psychiatric Services on “financial disincentives” for psychotherapy noted that psychiatrists could earn about $263 an hour doing three 15-minute “medication management” sessions, verses about $156 for a 45 to 50-minute therapy session, representing a pay cut of close to 41% per hour for doing therapy only.

The most common excuse given for the high rate of prescribing psychiatric drugs is that talk, behavioral, cognitive or other forms of non-drug treatment cost too much. However, in 2008, more than $24 billion worth of antidepressants and antipsychotics were dispensed. “Such expenditure would employ 240,000 psychotherapists earning an annual income of $100,000 to provide 6 million hours of psychotherapy averaging 25 client-hours a week,” Murray estimates.