Psychiatrists vs. Psychologists: New Rules

Freud's office: Buddha heads and the original psychotherapist's couch (my.ilstu.edu)

(TIME) Psychologists and psychiatrists tend to hate each other. The reasons are historical: beginning even before Freud, psychologists held enormous power over the cultural imagination. The whole idea of psychiatry — an explicitly chemical rather than behavioral treatment of the mind — didn't start until the industrial age, and for a long time afterward, psychiatrists were held in disregard.

Friday morning, psychiatrists take a bit of revenge. Even after years of symposia and papers designed to reconnect the two tendril branches of mental-health treatment, the American Psychiatric Association has released new guidelines for treatment of depression that still denigrate the cognitive and behavioral approaches of the American Psychological Association.

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(Both organizations are called A.P.A., and neither will relinquish the shortened form to the other, because as it turns out, the nation's mental-health leaders act like children.)

According to the new guidelines — which will govern treatment for the 200,000 in-patient psychiatric patients in the U.S., as well as the 20 million or so who get out-patient treatment — the No.-1 preferred approach is drugs. Just drugs. More>>