In Ontario, a Battle for the Soul of Psychiatry

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From The Globe and Mail: “If the Ontario Ministry of Health has its way, the type of intensive psychotherapy Mr. A. has been receiving will end. A proposal the ministry made in January would radically limit psychotherapy provided by psychiatrists and family physicians. The ministry’s proposed new approach, modelled on U.S.-style, managed care, is designed to limit the type and amount of treatment individual patients will receive, regardless of their presenting symptoms. The Ontario Medical Association (OMA) opposes it, and both groups are meeting about it now.

The plan, which is described by its advocates as ‘radical,’ is designed to eventually get psychiatrists out of providing continuing care to patients altogether. If it goes through, it will be the biggest change in psychiatry in the history of the discipline in Canada, and turn psychiatrists from ‘treaters’ into ‘consultants’ who will diagnose patients in a single session, and make recommendations for others to follow, then wave goodbye.

Diagnose, and adios.”

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3 COMMENTS

    • I’m pretty certain if “psychiatry has a soul,” it will find it’s soul in the lake of fire some day.

      “it will … turn psychiatrists from ‘treaters’ into ‘consultants’ who will diagnose patients in a single session, and make recommendations for others to follow, then wave goodbye.”

      I found this to be what the psychiatrists who work in hospitals do already, in the US. But these absent psychiatrists do become mad, to the point of wanting to punch their patients, when the patient’s insurance company says it won’t continue to pay for their unneeded psychiatric services, thus allowing the patient to “wave goodbye.”

      Let’s hope this is an incremental step in getting rid of all the unneeded, iatrogenic illness creating, psychiatrists.

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  2. ‘modeled on U.S.-style, managed care”

    It’s a boom industry in the U.S.A. I imagine that more diagnosing, more drugging, and more of about everything concerned with turning people into mental patients is more state of the art in the bad ‘ole U.S.A.

    That they’ve got better things to be doing in Canada. The notion might not occur to them.

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