Psychopharmacology versus talk therapy

[Guest guest]

Personally, when it comes to the medication of emotional issues, I tend to side with those who counsel caution. I consider myself a (mostly) rational person, and when I smell a rat (suspect something is not what it appears), my response is to tell it how I see it.Presently, I am a bit worried by the apparently wholesale negative response to psychopharmacology I see in some areas of the ACT/CBT branch of psychology, and the reason for this is that their attitude places the group firmly in the ambit of non-science-based organizations such as Scientology -- an organization that has a long anti-psychiatry, anti-psychopharmacology record.My own take is that there is a role for both modes of therapy; indeed, often a combination of both seems to work best. I'm not qualified to say whether one is preferable to the other, but offer the opinion that practitioners ought to keep an open mind.That said, my 'cynic's radar' tells me to 'follow the money' if I want to get at what motivates certain humans to advocate for or against certain things. That is why I tend to favor the anti-psychopharmacology folks against the pharmaceutical companies and organizations such as Scientology -- the latter two being almost rabid capitalist enterprises interested in only one thing: the bottom line, financially speaking.For me, for now, until better evidence presents itself, I would advocate wholeheartedly for the ACT/CBT folks, even if I don't 'get' more than a smidgin of what they're on about.And then there's my 'sooper-sekrit bullshit detector': the one that hasn't detected one gram of BS from any of the ACT/CBT practitioners who post on this list.To them as to you -- all those who post here, I really hope that this year (2012 here in Australia) is the one in which the fever breaks, and you experience utterly all that you feel, and feel utterly all that you experience.Salutations,Detlef