Assessing Therapy’s Performance Record

Mary McNamara’s article on psychology (“Are We Better Yet?” Jan. 18) suffers from the error of those who condemn without considering alternatives. We have more people with heart problems now than 50 years ago. Does that mean cardiology has failed? It means simply that, partly due to the success of cardiology, people live longer, creating more heart problems.

In the case of mental health, any opinion of its failure or success would have to include an accurate estimate of what our population’s mental health would be if we did not have trained psychiatrists and psychologists available now and during the last century. Our problem is, in part, that life in a democracy gets increasingly complicated with modernity and freedom. In a dictatorship, no one has to worry about whom to vote for.

Also, as a professional clinical psychologist, I resent being placed in the same category as “pop psychologists.” It is like putting witch doctors and astrologers and trained physicians in the same pot. On another point made by the writer, happiness is not necessarily the final criterion of successful living. Many would prefer to be insightful rather than merely happy or content.

Regretfully, McNamara’s article is misleadingly simplistic.

--THEODORE C. KENT

Ventura

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If you think that going from a “me” generation to a “poor me” generation (the victim culture is a uniquely American psychological phenomenon), yes, we’re getting better. If America’s having become such a child-centered culture that fewer and fewer American adults mature emotionally past the age of 12 (you’d be amazed how many grown men and women are still afraid of their parents), then we’re getting better. If the result of decades of psychotherapy is a nation of “sufferers” (as in “I suffer from low self-esteem”) eager to reclassify bad behavior and bad manners as a series of “disorders” treatable by drugs (sorry, “medications”), then, yes, we’re getting better.

If we get any more mentally healthy like this, this nation will collapse.

--KEVIN DAWSON

Sunland