[petea]

"The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health has purchased advertisements to accompany this series. While CAMH professionals are quoted in this story, the organization had no involvement in the creation or production of this, or any other, story in the series."

What I can surmise from this article is basically that most Canadian therapists want the high steady income like medical doctors.

[briandear]

That's exactly it. I'm the cofounder of online therapy company iCouch and the number 1 problem I hear about among therapists: getting and retaining clients. Primary care doctors don't have that problem. It isn't because of lack of funding, at least not in the United States because nearly all health insurance plans cover some number of yearly visits to a mental health practitioner. The problem is that there is a certain percentage of the therapy/mental health profession that engages in unscientific quackery which diminishes the perceived value of the other percentage of professionals who practice science-based mental health care. There are licensed practitioners who are often little more than faith healers; there aren't actually any standards of care for mental health. Of course there are license requirements, but there isn't really an "FDA approved" method of therapy to treat depression; so there gets to be a lot of problems with clients actually NOT benefitting from a particular therapist.

It's pretty much certain that if you went to a licensed family doctor with a sore throat that you'd get treatment that would likely cure the sore throat. If it were a bacterial infection (i.e. Strep,) then you'd be prescribed an appropriate anti-biotic. If it were viral, there's be treatment for the symptoms and in a few days, the problem would be cured. If you went to a licensed therapist for anxiety treatment, there's a likelihood that they'd attempt whatever "method" they've "developed" to "treat" the problem yet without any accountability in terms of if their approach actually is based on the scientific literature or it is was just based on some applied wishful thinking. It's also interesting that you'll have psychoanalysts spending YEARS with a client while a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist (CBT) often gets measurable results in a few sessions. Obviously every person is different, but how can a payer (insurance) justify spending years paying a psychoanalysts when CBT works (especially for things like anxiety disorders) [1].

I have psychoanalysts violently disagreeing about CBT effectiveness, but then again, if they admitted to the evidence supporting CBT for anxiety, then they'd cause a substantial problem with their own credibility and desire for a client to see them every week for years (such as in your typical Woody Allen film.)

The point is that there needs to be treatment protocols that are standardized within mental health (especially in the non-Psychiatric side of things.) Without standardized protocols, a client could be "depressed" as long as a therapist can convince them that they're still depressed.

That's a dark side of this business. I'm deep in this business with iCouch -- I've seen this stuff up close for over 5 years; in fact it was one of the reasons we started the company, was to try and bring some improvements to the field. But it's like trying to move a glacier uphill!

1 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/