Epidemiology: Open Access
Open Access

Abstract

This workshop addresses the future role of psychotherapy and psychosocial treatment in psychiatry and mental health treatment. This future depends on several factors related to psychiatric practice and teaching, but also to government policy toward funding treatment and research. In the realms of practice, teaching and research, it is ironic that, as psychiatric practice has become increasingly narrowly biologically focused, evidence is accumulating that psychotherapy and psychosocial treatment are effective forms of treatment for a range of individual and complex comorbid disorders. The field’s biologically reductionistic stance constitutes a kind of “tunnel vision” that contributes to the increasingly recognized phenomenon of treatment resistance in psychiatry. This workshop reports evidence from epidemiology, molecular genetics and clinical research suggesting that psychiatry is adversely influenced by 3 unwitting false assumptions linked to its biological reductionistic stance: [1] Genes = disease, [2] Patients present with single disorders that respond to single evidence based treatments, and [3] The best treatments are pills. The future of psychiatry, and the role of psychotherapy and psychosocial treatment, depend on the field’s ability to address these false assumptions, but also on policy issues like full implementation of mental health parity, and a shift in research and education policy that prioritizes funding of research into and teaching of nonspecific and specific “elements” shared by effective psychosocial therapies.

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