John F. Lauerman

Over the past decade, cost containment efforts have pushed psychotherapy patients away from psychiatrists and toward the offices of psychologists, therapists and other less expensive mental health workers. The availability of new drug treatments for psychiatric disorders has shifted many psychiatrists' practices away from a long-term therapeutic focus to that of short-term drug treatment. If psychiatry merely reacts to these economic and political forces, rather than managing them with a plan, the future of the field is highly uncertain.