yes. Many people refuse to see a psychiatrist because of the stigma involved.

That's a good question and a good point. No. Psychiatric training is very important when prescribing anti-depressants. If the doctor misdiagnoses the severity of the depression, s/he may be giving the person just enough of a lift to be able to find the energy to commit suicide.

I get mine from my family MD and he knows a heck of a lot more than some of the psychiatrist around here do. There is a pysch. here that will take people off meds they have been stable on for years and put them on something different JUST so he will have an excuse to see them for follow up every month. He has NO IDEA what he's doing. I have been prescribed the same drugs by my family MD for years and he's never failed once. If he has a question, he will research the drug before giving it to me. I have no problem with it. I think it's a shame that psychologist cannot prescribe it myself..cause they know a hell of a lot more about me by seeing me every week than any MD I see every few weeks or months.

yes. i live in appalachia and i haven't been able to recruit a psychiatrist or child psychiatrist out here. so, if somebody wants antidepressants, they either see their PCP in 3 days or a psychiatrist 2 hours away in 6 months.

I always thought if doctors are going give meds, they do need to know everything about what they're doing. That means training in the entire field of what conditions they are treating. If they're not required to be thoroughly trained, would it be any different than giving the guy next door a prescription pad and notebook to start giving meds out as he pleased to anybody he felt like giving them to?? They just seem like a bunch of drug company endorsed pill pushers. I'm not saying that people don't need meds, because there are serious cases where people do need them. They need to be thoroughly diagnosed by a professional that knows what he/she is doing.

Of course. There are many reasons. 1.) If we made it illegal for doctors to treat anything out of their "specialty," we'd have a lot of people running around with undiagnosed and untreated problems. Can you imagine a cardiologist saying, "Well, I think your stomach pain is an ulcer, but I'd be breaking the law if I gave you a prescription for it."? 2.) What is "mind-altering"? If you mean a drug that has cognitive side effects, there are plenty of drugs that have them without being considered traditional psychiatric medications. Take good old benadryl. If you give it to an elderly person, delirium is a very good bet. 3.) There just ain't enough shrinks to go around. Fewer and fewer medical students are choosing to go into psychiatry. Why? Compared to the procedure-rich specialties, it just doesn't pay as well. When you've got over $100,000 in educational debt, that makes a difference. If non-psychiatrists couldn't prescribe psychotropic medication, many people with depression would remain miserable and untreated. 4.) Just because a doctor hasn't done a psychiatric residency doesn't mean that he or she hasn't had some training in the use of psychiatric medications. Frankly, I'd rather see a newly minted family practitioner prescribe prozac than an 80 year-old psychiatrist who hasn't followed up with the medical journals. 5.) As someone else said, there are many people who wouldn't be caught dead (sometimes literally) seeing a psychiatrist. Sorry if I'm acting preachy, but this is actually my area of both clinical and research interest. I'm a primary care physician, and I'm trying to figure out ways to better integrate depression care into primary care. Treating people with depression is a lot of what I do for a living. :-)

That's a good point! There's a variation on that, when people ask whether it's better to go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist. While psychologists can't prescribe medicine, they've typically had four times more coursework on how the mind works than psychiatrists. It all seems backwards that someone with NONE of this training can prescribe the medicine.

Doctors and their patients seem to think that a pill cures all ills