*mental-illness here is to mean what the DSM categorizes as a mental-illness and not that I believe all mental-illnesses are actual illnesses.
Psychiatry - Seems to believe that causation of a *mental-illness can be ignored in curing it; uses directly obtrusive brain altering methods and medications to cure.
Psychotherapy - Seems to believe that causation of a *mental-illness should not be ignored in curing it; uses an understanding of causation to indirectly cause the *mental-illness to disappear.
Given the above, when do you think it is wrong for psychiatry to directly alter someone's brain? And when do you think it is wrong for psychotherapy to try and change someone indirectly? When is it right? And how can or should they be reconciled?
My understanding is that the division is more along the lines that psychiatry is medical model in diagnosis and treatment solutions, therefore they examine brain lesions, body and brain chemistry, determine symptoms based upon organic illness.
Psythotherapy considers learning, environment, systems and adaptation and/or adjustment when making diagnosis and prescribing treatment.
They examine different things but there's less division than their was, definitions of illness and disorder are more consensus bound now, they involve behaviour which is maladjusted or maladaptive in specific cultural contexts and the crucial criterion of personal distress.
To be honest the greater division is between past and problem focused interventions and future and solution focused if you ask me, some practitioners on the basis of high minded principles about truth and occasionally rants about years of practice norms they dont want to be associated with will say that focusing upon a problem, defining it, knowing it, discovering its origins, undoing repression is totally necessary, even if it involves retraumatisation of patients by destroying myths and rationalisations which have been heretofore stabilising and providing some esteem, like myths about incapable or neglectful parenting, while others will say well, what is the solution instead.
One of the greatest disputes about it I know involved a paper presented to a conference on a patient presenting with sleep problems who states they believe that their upstairs neighbour is beaming lights down into their head while they sleep and stealing their thoughts, the therapist listens to that and never mentions it again, they counsel and work with the patient to get sleep, who does, the patient is when happy, fit and well, they state that they themselves believe that sleep deprivation caused them to think and say odd things. Now more than half the assembled practitioners left that conference and condemned that paper because they said that no work had actually been done on the underlying personality structure which they believed was probably paranoid or schizoid.
Personally I dont believe its the place of anyone interested in genuine caring, cure and recovery from distressed or disordered thinking to engage in endless muck racking, opening and reopening old wounds, confronting already troubled people with more troubling information.
I've seen that shit abused in the context of troubled teens repeatedly confronted with the reality of their family background and parents short comings, sometimes it increases resistance to change or help, sometimes it just causes despair, a lot of the time the only person its satisfying is the practitioner or professional who has some shit wrong with their empathy, slavishly adheres to theory or has some unconscious need for self-regard and self-congratulation through comparison of their own familial back story with that of less fortunate persons.
OK, I'm a bore about this but anyway.