Pros and cons of psychologist prescribing medication

Prescription privileges for psychologist

Everyone knows that the mental health care system has undergone massive changes over the past decades. Power has increasingly shifted away from doctors and towards health insurance and drug companies. Traditional health insurance plans have all but died out, replaced by more `efficient' managed care models. Drug company breakthroughs have also occurred, so that it is now possible to treat most mental disorders with medicine, rather than with psychotherapy alone. As a result, when mental health care is offered these days, it is generally first offered in the form of medicine. Drug companies, for their part, now market directly to potential patients who, in turn ask their doctors to prescribe specific medicines. Patients and physicians both have come to expect a medical solution to mental health problems(Maes, 287).

Despite the multiple avenues open to allow professionals to prescribe (with appropriate experience and training), the professional field of clinical psychology believes in behavior and psychology somehow makes it special. It believes it should be given the unique right to prescribe after taking what amounts to a crash course in human physiology and biology. After only 300 or so contact hours of coursework (which roughly translates into the equivalent of 27 hours of traditional course credit) and supervised prescriptions with 100 patients, psychologists believe they will have the necessary knowledge to adequately prescribe powerful psychiatric medications — the same medications which can interact badly with a wide variety of physical conditions, diseases and other non-psychiatric medications (Dantzer, 46).

The pros and cons of the proposal to link prescription privileges specifically to psychological training vary from the point of view of the constituencies involved. First, it is scientist-practitioners who are resisting the move toward prescription privileges, not so much the basic science organizations. Second, while the practice-based ...