Reprinted from the Centre Daily Times of State College, PA, online at CentreDaily.com; Posted on Sun, Jun. 24, 2007

On June 9, a panel of psychoanalysts from Slate Magazine gave their final evaluation of Tony’s therapy on the popular HBO series. What they didn’t realize was that they also wrote the obituary for their own profession when they agreed that Tony’s flirtation with psychoanalysis had run its course: “I think it was becoming clear that this treatment couldn’t be defended, and you couldn’t really explain where it was going or what its purpose was,” said one member.

Tony’s experience with therapy is society’s experience.

Psychotherapy has gone from ineffective at best to harmful at worst, and the drug companies have stealthily taken over the profession at the expense of our families’ well-being.

I should know. As an Episcopal minister, people confide in me what they can’t tell their doctors and therapists. Anxious mothers tell me they’ve lost hope for a talking cure in their marriage or their children, while they pop Lorazepam like breath mints. More than 25 percent of their children are on antidepressants by college, and parents despair that their kids will never know life without these drugs. Moved by their anguish, I recently became a psychologist-in-training at Penn State. Knowing what I know now however, I fear I’ve become part of the problem rather than the solution.

“The Sopranos” creator and several of his writers saw firsthand that psychology is rudderless when they attended the American Psychological Association conference in 2005. Many of the 9,000 psychologists acknowledged the failure of the profession both scientifically and as a force for humanist activism. According to the New York Times, “Many therapists at the conference said that if the field did not incorporate more scientifically testable principles, its future was bleak” (Dec. 27, 2005).

Notice that Tony’s son A.J. regresses even while he takes Lexapro.

Psychiatrists secretly know that A.J. is not alone. While psychotherapy was asleep on guard duty, the drug companies came in and robbed our families of any hope for independence and self-realization.

A front-page article in the May 10 New York Times exposes how the makers of psych medications have “bought” some of the top psychiatrists and researchers in the country. These psychiatrists not only prescribe psych meds to our children on scant evidence, they actively lecture to other psychiatrists on the benefits, while taking money from the drug companies.

The immediate past president of the American Psychiatric Association admits that psychiatrists have become too cozy with drug makers. He specifically cited A.J.’s Lexapro as an example, because it is now the most widely used antidepressant in the country even though there are cheaper alternatives, including generic versions of Prozac.

“Prozac is just as good if not better, and yet we are migrating to the expensive drug instead of the generics,” he said. “I think it’s the marketing.”

And the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, who is now provost at Harvard, acknowledged, “There’s an irony that psychiatrists ask patients to have insights into themselves, but we don’t connect the wires in our own lives about how money is affecting our profession and putting our patients at risk,” he said.

The $9 billion we spend each year on psychotherapy may seem like big money, but it’s already dwarfed by the $13.5 billion spent each year on antidepressants alone, and that figure is skyrocketing. A Forbes Magazine cover article (April 9) describes how corporate benefits programs favor a drug cure over a talking cure, which has not proven itself after decades of favor.

Old-style psychotherapy, with its protracted bonding of caregiver and patient, is akin to “rent-a-friend,” says Samuel Mayhugh, an expert in managing mental health benefits for corporations. “Employers cannot afford to be renting friends for their employees.”

Traditional psychology dug its own grave three decades ago, when it began to propagate the harmful myth that the more attention we give our kids, the better they’ll turn out. In fact, we’re raising generations of narcissists.

On June 11, an NPR report blamed parenting trends in the past twenty-five to thirty years for creating the “What’s In It For Me?” generation.

On April 20, the Wall Street Journal wrote of the “economic, labor and social ramifications. Adults who were overpraised as children are apt to be narcissistic at work and in personal relationships, says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University. Narcissists aren’t good at basking in other people’s glory, which makes for problematic marriages and work relationships, she says.

Now, traditional psychology is digging our children’s graves. If we psychologists don’t confront our role in tragedies such as Virginia Tech and Columbine, there’s more to come. We claim that what these mass killers needed was for someone to listen to them that somehow, everything would be fine if only they had received more attention. We may blame guns or video games, but David Drehle writes in Time Magazine that psychologists from South Africa to Chicago are realizing that extreme self-centeredness is the common denominator in these heinous crimes. How many more Virginia Tech’s do we need before we wake up?

Tony Soprano’s therapist did nothing to quell his raging narcissism or help his family. But they only live on TV. For parents and psychologists in the real world, we’d better do something fast to clean up the mess we made.

David Arthur Code is an Episcopal minister and psychologist-in-training at Penn State. He just completed a book on “How to Stay Married and Raise Great Kids.”

Leave a Reply