Note: This is a re-post from my old blog.
A quick vocabulary lesson: A psychiatrist is a physician that has chosen to specialize in the study and treatment of mental health issues. It is a specialty that requires at least an extra four years of training on top of the basic four years of med school and grants the ability to prescribe medication if deemed necessary. A psychologist is someone who holds a doctorate degree in psychology and is commonly referred to as "counselor" or "therapist". It takes at least seven or eight years to obtain a Ph.D and licensing qualifications vary from state to state. A psychologist may refer a patient to a psychiatrist if they feel the patient requires drug therapy as part of an effective treatment.
The article inspiring this post is "Talk Doesn't Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy" which examines the shift in psychiatry over the past half-century from unhurried appointments and slow, careful treatments to what the profiled doctor sees as a "bus station" of patients where he is forced to make quick diagnoses, prescribe drugs, and send patients on their way in order to make a living. I have to take issue with the rather dismal view this article casts on the entire mental health field, which could possibly drive people even further away from seeking help, especially vulnerable and peer-sensitive people like college students. USA Today reports that rates of depression are rising in my peer group but I wonder if students understand their options to treat these feelings.
I can only really speak about the options available at the University of Georgia but I believe those options and my experiences to be pretty common to colleges and universities around the country. At UGA we have the Counseling and Psychiatric Services (CAPS) center as a resource to any student, professor, or university affiliate that needs it. There are a few steps to get started, but they're pretty easy. You need to call CAPS on a weekday between 10 and 4 p.m. for a telephone interview that takes maybe 25 minutes. Then you make an appointment to see an intake therapist who talks about everything that makes you feel stressed or uncomfortable or unhappy and then suggests what type of treatment would be best for fixing those problems. This can take the form of seeing one of psychologists or psychiatrists on staff, drug therapy, group therapy, or a combination of actions. The first appointment is free and subsequent appointments depend on the type of insurance you have (but are usually pretty affordable for those without). Unfortunately, there is a bit of a waiting period between your intake appoint and regular appoints because of the large numbers of students seeking help and the comparatively small size of the CAPS department. But all the more reason to encourage the university to develop it further.
The reason I go into such detail about CAPS at UGA is that I'm pretty sure there is a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding out there. I was describing my idea for this post to a friend as "a look at the counseling services offered here and how students use them." Her immediate response was "do we have any?" The answer is yes, we do, and if you don't go to UGA, your school probably has one too. Talking to a mental health professional does not mean immediately being diagnosed with some kind of disorder or immediately being put on some sort of drug regime. College students face isolation, academic pressure, social pressure, financial stress, body image issue, and struggles for independence (just to name a few). Many of these issues can and are treated by so-called "talk therapy," which is simply talking about your problems and stress factor to a professional for about 30-60 minutes a session and receiving advice, feedback, and coping strategies on how best to deal with those issues.
I think (and this is just wild mass guessing here) another issue is that people are afraid of the stigma of being in therapy. Of all the advancements we've made as a society in defeating bias, racism, prejudice, we haven't really done a great job of removing the stigma associated with therapy. We expect patients to by raving about crazy things or dangerous to people, unable to control themselves or function like a normal human being.You get films like Sucker Punch and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Girl Interrupted that show horrible, horrible asylums that mistreat and abuse patients....which historically they did. But numerous reforms have gone into asylums today, hopefully making places of healing instead of mistreatment. I've gotten sidetracked again - the point I was trying to make is that people are afraid of loosing control when they start therapy. Actually the process pretty much empowers the patient to an extent that is hardly seen in other areas of medicine. The patient decides what therapist or psychiatrist they see, how often they see that person, how much of the suggested treatment they want to follow. Of course, success really only comes when a patient is comfortable and open with their doctor, sees them regularly, and communicates their opinions on treatment options. But still, the choice is there.
You don't need to feel like you are "depressed" to want to seek therapy. If you are feeling stressed or not sleeping and eating well or doing poorly on tests because you can't concentrate or having trouble making friends and adjusting to college - any number of reasons really, it's not a bad idea to explore your options and offerings of mental health care at your campus. Of course, I'm only working towards becoming a doctor, I'm not actually a doctor so take everything I write with three grains of salt before bedtime.
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