At a time when mood-altering drugs like Prozac have revolutionized the treatment of the mentally ill and HMOs are forcing caregivers to take the cheaper and quicker pharmacological route, the psychiatric profession, says UC San Diego anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, may be as tormented as the patient it seeks to treat. It is what psychiatrists do that other mental health therapists cannot do, and more and more psychiatrists spend more of their time prescribing medication.
More money is spent on developing psychopharmacogical drugs than in any other area of psychiatry.
Psychiatric medications, however, treat symptoms, not illnesses. As a psychological anthropologist, Luhrmann set out to discover and explain how psychiatrists are trained, how they develop their particular way of seeing and listening to their patients, what makes a psychiatrist successful, and how the enormous ambiguities in the field today affect its practitioners and its patients. She concludes that the two primary approaches to mental illness, psychotherapy and psychopharmacology, are taught so differently that they become almost different cultures. The American Psychiatric Association thinks that this integration is what training programs in psychiatry teach. Psychiatrists are supposed to understand these approaches as different tools in a common toolbox, yet they are taught as different tools, based on different models, and used for different purposes.