May 13, 2013 – Judith Shulevitz’s cover story in the New Republic, The Lethality of Loneliness, is a marvelous exposition of why psychotherapy/analysis — not the biomedical approach — can heal: it’s not the physiological disruptions/anomalies that cause the mental/emotional symptoms, it’s the other way around!
The physiological disruptions/anomalies are caused by the mental/emotional suffering. Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (the psychologist immortalized in “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”) understood that, and spoke to the loneliness, that’s what was healing. Approaching mental/emotional distress from a strictly biomedical “understanding” ends up loading distressed people up with powerful drugs rather than humanly speaking to the distress. Because the powerful pharmaceutical companies are so driven by the massive profits of this model, it will be a long time before we finally back off the biomedical approach. In the meantime psychological approaches (including talk therapy) will continue to be derided as “out-of-date” or “on the wane,” by those entrenched in the medical model.
Judith Shulevitz is the science editor of The New Republic.