Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [370]
Of all the ways in which psychology influenced Americans during the past three quarters of a century, none has been more pervasive than the change it brought about in how they think of and deal with emotional and mental disorders. Many miseries, failures, disabilities, dissatisfactions, and misbehaviors that their forefathers attributed to weakness of character, wickedness, or Fate came to be seen by most Americans as psychological disorders that could be treated by mental health practitioners.
Acting on this conviction, in recent years some 10 million Americans made 86 million visits to psychotherapists annually, and in-patients in mental hospitals and psychiatric wards of general hospitals accounted for another several million sessions. Cumulatively, nearly one out of three persons—80 or 90 million—have had some experience with psychotherapy.4
About a third of these “consumers” of psychotherapy were treated by psychologists, about a third by physicians (but probably more of the total visits were made to psychologists than to physicians, since many users visited a physician only once to receive medication rather than talk therapy). The rest of the visits were made to clinical social workers, clinical mental health counselors, lay (nonmedical) analysts, and pastoral counselors. (Dr. Abe Wolf, current president of Division 29—psychotherapy—of the American Psychological Association, ruefully says in a recent online message from his division, “Psychologists struggle to maintain a distinct identity, competing with other professionals who all practice psychotherapy.”) Most of the above professionals (except for the physicians dispensing medication), despite their dissimilar backgrounds and allegiance, practice therapies that are psychological, as distinguished from such other approaches to mental illness as the physiological, social, and religious.5
The rise in the use of medication, however, has been notable; the nonmedical therapists now often refer their clients to a physician for medication (to be taken along with talk therapy), and many emotionally or mentally ailing people ask their own family physicians for mood-influencing medications. Some psychotherapists believe that medication has somewhat reduced the practice of psychotherapy, though they have no hard data on the issue. But Dr. Mark Olfson, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and the lead author of the latest survey of psychotherapy usage, recently told Erica Goode of the New York Times, “With all the attention given to antidepressants and other medications, the role of psychotherapy can be easily overshadowed… but [it is] clear that psychotherapy continues to play an important role in the mental health care of many Americans.”6
Psychology was not originally an applied science, and its training centers produced not “health care providers” but researchers and theorists. The discipline grew rapidly after World War II, as did all the sciences, with the number of science Ph.D.’s granted yearly increasing more than tenfold between 1945 and 1970. But then the baby boom of undergraduates ebbed, new degree holders had difficulty finding teaching positions, and doctorate production declined steeply in all the sciences—except psychology, which kept growing.
By the 1970s, however, psychology was growing not as a pure science but as several forms of applied science, of which health