As others have said, Psychiatry and Psychology are different. Psychiatrists can prescribe medication, while Psychologists are only lisenced to practice therapy and offer ways of coping that do not involve pharmaceutical intervention.
However, these two specialisms come from the same side of the coin when it comes to the fact that both of them are entrenched in the concept of diseases originating in "the mind".
There is an article floating out there somewhere about why Psychiatrists resist merging with Neurology, they seem to distance themselves from the idea of purely physical, somatic ailments causing someone to have a distressed mental state, I suppose because research is incredibly lacking in regards to mental ailments.
Likewise, many psychiatrists and psychologists seem to neglect very important environmental and socioeconomic factors that would rationally make a person depressed, scared, miserable, and anxious. I find it akin to scolding a person who recoils when they touch a hot stove. Your brain's natural response is to send out signals of pain in response to the damaging stimuli that has just burned the skin, you can't really control that reaction.
When people who are poor, alone disabled, underemployed or unemployed, marginalized, being abused, neglected, and so on and so forth seek assistance from the mental health industry, a lot of them are told they are ill and are either medicated unnecessarily or forced into things like CBT which tells them their negative feelings are cognitive distortions. When feeling awful and depressed in those situations is a completely natural response. If your environment is godawful, it is hard to delude yourself and pretend everything is peachy instead.
So instead of giving those people tangible help that would improve the mental anguish caused by their circumstances, or simply trying to provide symptom relief for things like lethargy, panic attacks, and loss of appetite, we tell them they are diseased. There is a serious lack of pragmatic help in these fields. People who need human connections aren't given opportunities for developing social skills besides their artificial interactions with the therapist. The impoverished aren't being given financial assistance. The unemployed aren't being given references and assistance with gaining employment.
I do believe medications and therapies have their place in some situations. I lived with a violent schizophrenic, who absolutely needed to be on a low dosage of Antipsychotics or else everyone in the family would be continually tormented by them. People who are violent or having extreme hallucinations do need pharmaceuticals to manage their conditions in the majority of cases. Likewise, Lithium can be helpful to some bipolar people. Yet, I think SSRIs are handed out like candy, and rarely alleviate the problem because the efficacy seems to be marginally higher than a placebo. A good number of serotonin receptors are in the GI tract, so I got nothing out of those medications except further illness.
Also, psychiatry truly lacks reliable diagnostic tools and relies on very subjective criteria. There are no blood tests, no scans, no biopsies, and things like the DSMV are often far too broad and speculative. I was seeing many different psychiatrists from age 13 to 20 and it took 6 years for them to order a laboratory test for me.
By then it was too late, I've had neuropathy for years now and it was very likely kickstarted by the fact I had dangerously low vitamin b12 levels for years and no general doctor or psychiatrist would give me a blood test, insisting my symptoms were psychosomatic.
Sure, these disciplines are not lobotomizing people anymore or locking women in prisons for disobeying their husbands under the guise that this behavior was lunacy and insanity.
However there are still human rights abuses going on every day in psychiatric wards. People being put in restraints because they're suicidal, forced drugging and physical exams that can traumatize a vulnerable person, gaslighting, verbal abuse, the list goes on and on. We should strive to criticise psychology and psychiatry to improve them, not shrug our shoulders and say, "well at least we aren't living in the barbaric times of lobotomies anymore!"
People airing their grievances against these professions on this forum doesn't mean that you personally have to stop engaging with these services or question their benefit to you, especially not if you've improved with voluntary therapy or psych meds and whatnot.
This discussion is not about those who personally benefited from psychiatry or psychology and thus see no issue with it, it is about the people who are receiving subpar, lackluster, un-scientific, and quite frankly, shitty care. Individuals who want things to change, and want to push for better treatments, diagnostic criteria, and services aren't going to impede someone from accessing things like talk therapy and SSRIs if they personally want those options for themselves and find them helpful.
But when it seems like the entire world does nothing but victim blame those who got no results from these things, and insists that it is a deficit of willpower and desire to change, that is the problem. Telling people they need to keep throwing out money to try a million different therapists is appalling. If you sent a plumber out to fix a leaky pipe and he couldn't do it, you wouldn't have to call 30 different plumbers to get the job done, would you? So why don't we hold counselors to the same standards?
I get that the science hasn't progressed far enough to understand complex cognitive processes and abnormalities. I am studying a Neuroscience degree, and I know how very little we actually know about things. Yet, we shouldn't put people in harms way and subject them to invalidation and gaslighting because of this. I blame stoicism for creating this falsehood that one can be in total control of their every thought and emotion. Sometimes, most of the time actually, that isn't the case. My severe ptsd isn't going away after reading some self help books about loving yourself.
You can't treat a malfunction of the fight or flight response with self help and mindfulness mantras. Neither can you fix derelict living conditions by popping a handful of pills. This is the dichotomy that psychiatry and psychology have plagued themselves with.
You aren't stupid for being skeptical of these things.
