Practicing under the influence: the medicalization of psychotherapy.

Abstract

Using a postpositivist empirical method with meaning as central, this dissertation is based on a series of interviews with mental health workers and other professionals involved with or associated with mental health. At issue is the extent to which the biomedical model of human functioning has coopted the mental health field especially as it affects the practice of psychotherapy. I believe that this question is important because of the disablement one can observe in client/patients and others, as well as the philosophical dilemmas confronting practitioners, as a result of their collective exposure to the idea that people may be essentially powerless in the face of their own biology. This perception appears to contribute to the vested interests of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries but it flies in the face of developments in the field of psychoneuroimmunology, neuroscience, and other emerging perspectives, which validate a force-like dimension of mind or focus and intention, and which stand to free people from dominance by external agents including psychotropic medication.