Psychotherapy and Psychiatry

An important reason for favouring a psychological approach is that individual distress is often the result of problems in human relationships and so is not best seen as a personal ‘disorder’ but more in terms of the effect of the way a system of relationships works. So psychologists specialising in psychotherapy will often consider the wider context such as relations within a family or at work. Some psychotherapists work directly with families and other groups of people.

Psychiatrists are medical practitioners who frequently take a medical approach to mental health and often prescribe drugs to alleviate distress. Medical approaches tend to see distress in terms of symptoms that indicate ‘disorders’ in much the same way as physical disorders are indicated. A diagnosis of a disorder, such as ‘obsessive-compulsive disorder’, ‘depression’, ‘anorexia nervosa’, ‘and post-traumatic stress disorder’, is linked to a prescribed treatment perhaps in the form of a drug or a specified psychological intervention.

This approach can be very effective for some people. However, although psychologists specialising in psychotherapy may refer to ‘disorders’ as a form of shorthand, they emphasise the value of an approach more rooted in psychology than in medicine. This is because, unlike a physical disease that may be linked to a particular virus, bacterium or genetic condition, psychological distress is more often linked to the way a person experiences events such as loss, accidents, war trauma, physical attacks, work stress, relationship difficulties, sexual abuse, emotional neglect during childhood and so on.