I’m certainly not practicing, but I do know a great deal about the profession, years ago and to a lesser extent now.

But I never got into The Sopranos. However, I find that, in general, portrayals of therapists in movies and TV shows often take liberties. Of course, therapists also sometimes take liberties.

It was only after I posted the comment that I remembered your profession. Since you have more knowledge than I do, I won’t necessarily retract what I said, but I’ll concede that any accuracy there was in my statement was arrived at by chance, rather than by real knowledge.

You make me think about something, though. Jennifer Melfi, while being a decent, good person, may not have been a very good therapist, which merely adds another layer of conflict to an already terrific show. In subsequent seasons, there are plotlines where we see Jennifer agonize over her therapeutic relationship with Tony. She has to go “on the lam” when the Mob learns of her existence and one of her patients kills herself in her absence. She thinks about informing Tony of her rapist’s identity after being attacked. And over the whole show, she’s conflicted about trying to help a recalcitrant criminal. It makes me admire Lorraine Bracco even more for portraying such a complex character.

Too many people assuming that ‘European Prices’ are fixed. Surely there are many medicines that are so important that they will pay more if that’s the only way to get them.

The thing is, there is another way to get them: break the patents. Making the drug is the cheap part of the process, and if you applied for a patent you’ve already told the government how to make the drug.

Those lower prices are negotiated with that threat in mind, that lower prices are better than being cut out altogether.

I don’t usually defend therapists, because I think so many of them are poor at what they do, and a significant number push harmful ideas such as “gender affirming therapy.” However, I take issue with your characterization.

Any even halfway decent therapist is well aware that drugs are no panacea and often don’t even work very well. But more to the point, it’s only psychiatrists who prescribe them (or regular MDs). For the most part today, psychiatrists are pill prescribers and don’t do traditional talk therapy, but they are the least numerous of the “therapist” types out there. Psychiatrists have MD degrees. However, the vast majority of therapist have MAs or MSs or MSWs or sometimes (less otten) PhDs. They are the ones who do talk therapy or related therapies like EMDR. For the most part, they consider drugs an adjunct to talk therapy. The idea of talk therapy is to “really confront the things that are causing their mental troubles,” although its track record is varied. For psychoses such as schizophrenia, however, drugs are still the treatment of choice because the cause is thought to be largely physical.

That one moment is an excellent indictment of the mental health business, and I’m sure it was intentional. For the next seven years, Tony takes his meds and goes to therapy, but he never gets any better, because he never faces the real problem: he’s a homicidal maniac who has lived with violence or the threat of it his whole life, going from a victim to a victimizer.

Most people don’t have the same problems as Tony, but they have been convinced by therapists to take the drugs instead of really confronting the things that are causing their mental troubles.

In my mind, the therapy sessions in that show are the best acting and the backbone of the show.

Yup. Rosenhan was big stuff for a long time.
One of the issues was that it seemed to fit what we thought we knew about such facilities.

How do you tell if someone is mentally ill if all you see of him is his going through the daily routine of being in a facility? Lots of mentally ill people can learn, and can take the easy way as long as their particular Thing isn’t awakened.

Yup. Rosenhan went along with popular and in some cases professional wisdom, so to speak.

Recently I learned that one of the most damning indictments of psychiatry that I had known of was most likely fraudulent. It was the one where supposedly students who had no mental health issues got themselves committed.

The odds of keeping your limbs attached
Are not large

Miguel cervantes
Wrote two-thirds of a haiku

“Psych Meds And Veblen Goods”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/psych-meds-and-veblen-goods
Key grafs:

…Psych meds are now common among adults and children. It’s a massive industry: like cell phones and TVs generations ago, they migrated through the class structure year by year.

Now comes “Unshrunk” by Laura Delano, a book that could change everything…

…Nothing I say can possibly prepare you for the adventure this book brings. It is perfectly crafted almost in a poetic way to bring to the reader the actual feeling of going through each stage over a decade and a half of drug cocktails, mental institutions, hospitals, and much more, and finally to her self-motivated emancipation from the whole industry…

… most, the social-register set in Greenwich, Connecticut, descendent of a three-term president, a prep-school educated and Harvard-bound beneficiary of every financial and social privilege, one afforded the best psychiatric care available anywhere.

She was not mistreated. She was treated. She says this herself:

“I was once mentally ill, and now I’m not, and it wasn’t because I was misdiagnosed…. In fact, I was properly diagnosed and medicated according to the American Psychiatric Association’s standard of care. The reason I’m no longer mentally ill is that I made a decision to question the ideas about myself that I’d assumed were fact and discard what I learned was actually fiction.”….