FL Psychologists Could Prescribe Medication Under New Bill

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From WJCT: “A new bill would allow psychologists in Florida to prescribe medication. If passed, Florida would be the sixth state to make the change. […]

‘There’s just a huge need for people who can prescribe effectively,’ said Andrew Hicks, legislative chair of the Florida Psychological Association. ‘And it also would allow psychologists to be able to help those patients who need to get off medication, or who need a combined therapy of psychotherapy and medication management.’

Hicks says by 2025 there will be a greater shortage of psychiatrists than any other medical specialty.  […]

To qualify, licensed psychologists would have to take a two-year psychopharmacology course, complete clinical hours and pass an exam.

The American Psychological Association has praised the passage of similar efforts in Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, New Mexico and Louisiana.”

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5 COMMENTS

  1. Are these therapists also going to be able to order the required medical testing to be sure the poor sap their drugging the crazy out of (or inducing more crazy into) doesn’t have an actual underlying medical condition?

    This is nothing more than an attempt to play doctor by a group of people who have not gone to medical school! How can these people possibly be expected to recognize cases of underlying medical illness when actual doctors struggle to do so?

    I want to know which groups lobbied for these laws and how much money they donated to the candidates who voted for them.

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    • This is about supplementing psychiatrists, individuals demonstrably uninterested in looking for underlying medical conditions affecting extreme mental states. The psychiatric community would be outraged if their “lesser” psychological brethren were capable of doing so when they weren’t and actually did so as a result.

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      • It looks from my angle like a guild war – psychologists want in on the 15-minute med check action and psychiatrists want to protect their turf. Nothing to do with caring for their supposed clients.

        Any psychologist who wanted to be able to prescribe would be immediately scratched from my list of possible helpers.

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    • This is nothing more than an attempt to play doctor by a group of people who have not gone to medical school!

      Hmmm, don’t totally buy this logic; it sort of suggests that having gone to medical school legitimizes the prescription of neurotoxins. The main issue is that they’re poison, administered fraudulently, no matter the “credentials” of the person recommending them.

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  2. There’s a little bit of infighting between the two professions going on here, surely, but the situation is more severe than that. This campaign for pill pushing psychologists is, in my estimation anyway, a lot like those campaigns we’ve been seeing, and which I support, to legalize recreational marijuana use. Psychologists can prescribe pharmaceuticals in 5 states now, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, New Mexico, and Louisiana. 10 states have legalized recreational weed use. At this point, I think we’re fated, some might say doomed, to have both eventually. The argument regarding a scarcity of shrinks is completely bogus. Into the 19th century it wouldn’t have been medical doctors that we would have been talking about so much as lunatic asylum superintendents, and if it were drugs, the drugs would have been opium derivatives and laudanum, that kind of thing. Funny thing, too, with the opioid crisis we’ve heard so much talk about. I’ve still got this idea in my head that there isn’t much difference between an opiate and an opioid. Now if only professionals were prescribing recreation instead of drugs we might be getting somewhere.

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