Quote from: EmmaM on May 20, 2011, 04:32:46 PM
Psychiatry is the medical treatment of the psyche, psychology is the science of the psyche.
To be perfectly honest, they've all moved away from the psyche and full speed into the medical model. Psychiatrists prescribe pills to fix people on a neurochemical level. Psychology is the use of empirically validated treatment methods that insurance companies approve to treat the diagnosable conditions listed in the DSM. No validation? No payment. And they have guidelines: if someone has
x, you're approved to do
y and
z to treat them, nothing else.
Psyche
* was the Greek word for both "soul" and "butterfly" (literally, butterflies were "little souls," as they mirrored our own Hero's or Hera's Journeys). There's no such thing as soul in psychology or psychiatry anymore. That's a dirty word, and that's why therapists who practice methods that acknowledge and holistically engage with a client's soul are cash only, because no insurance company will reimburse for that treatment.
As an aside, at University of Colorado Denver (where I got my degree), the psychology department is the only department in the entire school who refuses to crosslist a course with the religious studies department. Think about that for a second. That means math, engineering, physics, chemistry, business, biology, sociology, political studies, public administration, anything you can think of, crosslists with religious studies, while psychology has turned the department down repeatedly. It's a revealing light on what psychology really thinks about the concept of a
whole person that they've abandoned the person-centered aspect of their field in order to prove that they're a serious science and not some pseudo-wishy-washy-claptrap. It's also why you'll learn next to nothing about William James or Carl Jung in a psychology classroom, as they were traitors to the field who dared posit that we're more than collection of neurochemical processes interacting with an external environment.
(Yes, psych was my major. Yes, it kind of depressed me sometimes...)
* Psyche was also the child bride of the god of the underworld in Greek myth, but I didn't have to go there.
