Why practice talk therapy when "everybody wants a quick fix"?

• In Event: Medical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 5. Mental Health

Abstract

Despite biomedicine’s vast power and wide reach and, although the use of medication alone is still the most dominant form of outpatient mental health treatment, there have been small but meaningful shifts toward greater use of talk therapy as the primary mode of treatment. There was an increase between 2018 and 2021 in the use of psychotherapy as a sole treatment (11.5 to 15.4%), which has become uncommon in a biomedical world. In addition, treatment with psychotropic medication alone declined from 67.6% to 62.1% (Olfson et al 2025). Taken together, these trends suggest that an understanding of the role of talk therapy and the insights of people who practice it are particularly important in this moment. Using interviews with 30 talk therapists, I describe what they see as an ongoing and central role for talk therapy despite the overwhelming pervasiveness of both biomedical and behavioral treatments. I suggest that talk therapy has a renewed role to play in the landscape of mental health treatment given the disappointments with biomedicine and the rigidity of both biomedical and behavioral interventions.

Author

• Dena T. Smith, University of Maryland-Baltimore County