> Good psychiatrists absolutely “call themselves doctors” and definitely seek to exclude or treat organic causes of psychiatric symptoms.

Well, yeah, you're just stating the contrapositive corollary to my assertion: that psychiatrists who don't "call themselves doctors" [i.e. who don't think of themselves as treating the patient's problem holistically first-and-foremost, and instead just do "talk therapy but you can prescribe"] are bad psychiatrists.

> Your ideas about how psychiatry is practiced might have been correct in the 1950’s

It might just be where I live (Canada), or the particular moment one will find a psychiatrist in their career to have openings to accept new patients to their private practice without a years-long waitlist... but the vast majority of psychiatrists I've interacted with personally as a patient, or have heard about interactions with through friends, have all had a distinctly 1950s mindset.

It might be because most of them have been seemingly nearly old enough to have gone to medical school in the 1950s. Most of them are only a year or two away from retirement.

(Which is frustrating, because it means I and others I know have to keep getting a referral to a new psychiatrist; wait-listing in to see them for an initial consult; seeing them for 1-2 years; and then getting dropped when the psychiatrist retires. And no, none of the psychiatrists I've been to have ever tried to create treatment continuity by cross-referring to another still-working psychiatrist; you just arrive at their office one day for an appointment you scheduled six months back to find it empty.)

But it also seems to imply that — despite the regular continuing education requirements for maintaining licensing — these folks don't seem to actually put the more-modern perspectives they've been exposed to into practice.

[dead]