> > > > you went to a psychiatrist. There's a very important distinction between a psychiatrist and a psychologist. Most people think that a psychiatrist is a psychologist that can prescribe medicine. This is NOT true! Most psychiatrists majored in pre-med, then went to med school. Then they did their residency with a psychiatrist. In other words, they only received psychological training from their residency!
> > > >
> > > > A psychologist, on the other hand, has at least his masters degree. He majored in psych, then got his masters in psych, and quite often got his PhD in psych. Psychologists have much more training in psychology and as such are not so quick to medicate.
> > > >
> > > > Unless it is truly a chemical imbalance, I'm quite opposed to throwing drugs at a psychological problem. #1, it just treats the symptoms- - - it doesn't treat the underlying causes. #2, often you wind up having to be on that drug for the rest of your life or risk going back where you started.
> > > >
> > > > Paxil is especially evil. [...]
> > > >
> > > > Find a good psychologist and work with him.
>
> I'm a psych major and I spend most of my on-campus time talking to psychologists/psychiatrists. I'm not saying you're wrong- - - what I am saying is that she needs to go see another doctor before she takes this drug because 1) the one she has sounds like he either hasn't told her what she has or isn't sure himself if she has SAD or major depression -- - For him to prescribe a drug either without knowing exactly why or without telling HER exactly why is inexcuseable and points to the possibility that he's a "throw drugs at everything" kind of shrink. 2) [...] Good therapy often lasts years, and sometimes the doctor will lose a patient because the patient doesn't feel better immediately, so the shrink gets two advantages out of paxil - - he keeps his patient AND he ensures that she has to keep coming back to him for more drugs.
>

shadowfax, you've got a number of things going on here. I'm not exactly sure why you are so ardently anti-shrink. A psychiatrist does a three- to four-year residency with hands-on clinical work in psychiatry, *after* getting his/her M.D. (the latter of which, if you ask me, is already equivalent to achieving a Ph.D). Next, in order to get LICENSED as a practising therapist, a shrink has to do additional years of supervised post-residency training so that s/he qualifies to take the board-certified exams. By the time you add all this up, the doctor has at least an equivalency of years of psychological training to any "psychologist who majored in psych." And the board doesn't accept any old quack who was looking for an easy way to complete his residency requirements. Applicants for licensing are grilled to see if they possess a necessarily high degree of psychological insight.

But regardless of whether a client is seeing a psychologist or a psychiatrist, only one thing is important thing to find out: it is whether the doctor/therapist is a person who is competent and trustworthy... who inspires confidence... who can assess the client's situation properly and offer a potentially effective plan of treatment. I would agree with you that a psychiatrist might be suspect, if he/she is willing to dole out a Paxil prescription on the basis of one meeting with the client. You could perhaps fault Sakura's doctor for not making absolutely, literally 100% crystal clear that she understood what the prescription was for. But how many people, upon learning that they "have something bad" -- like, say, ankylosing spondylitis or fulimating taxoplasmosis -- are willing to ask their doctors to know *exactly* how the drug they'll be getting will help their condition?

Of course it is always a good idea to get a second opinion, especially if the client feels he/she is NOT being best served by the doctor/therapist. But just because someone is receiving a Paxil prescription does not mean that the person is being horribly misdiagnosed and mistreated, you know. In the case of intensely acute social phobic disorder, a person may have anxiety to such an extent that he'll break into nervous sweats and tremble at the thought of walking into a supermarket to pick up a package of Cheerios. In that case, SPD is an actual chemical imbalance that ought to be treated, if we have the means to treat it safely. Certainly a psychologist might approach the problem instead with cognitive therapy, and with a graduated series of desensitization exercises to help the client achieve mastery over a specific social phobia. I'm not entirely keen on the idea that this approach might properly last 'years' to achieve 'satisfactory' results. If the problem in the first place starts as a chemical disorder, it ought to be addressed as such. Our minds are rooted to physical brain processes which occasionally can be overwhelmed by very physical disorders. Just because we don't know exactly how a drug works, or why it doesn't work all the time, or why it only works on certain people, is not a valid argument to conclude that giving certain antidepressant drugs is automatically evil.

Wolfspirit