We Need to Go Back

Thank you for the thoughtful and comprehensive review of the presidential symposium in the article “Experts Call for New Ways to Collaborate With Pharma” in the July 3 issue. For one who wasn't at APA's 2009 annual meeting, what was conveyed was informative and encouraging. I have found it interesting that in my new part-time work as a prison psychiatrist, I have found the use of older antidepressants and antipsychotics to be generally quite satisfactory in many cases.

I would like to make an additional point. It is clear that our field has become more biological, and more and more psychiatrists tend to do 15-minute med checks. As Dr. Steven Sharfstein once said during his presidency, the biopsychosocial model has become the bio-bio-bio model. My sense is that the strong influence of pharma was one of the major factors, in addition to managed care and reimbursement issues, that led to this change. I doubt that just changing our relationship to pharma will head us back in the other direction. What can we now do to reestablish us as biopsychosocial psychiatrists?


H. STEVEN MOFFIC, M.D.
 Milwaukee, Wis.