Sleeping for Fun and Profit

The recent New York Times article describing the psycho pharmacotherapy practice of Pennsylvania psychiatrist Donald Levin, M.D. garnered considerable negative attention from the psychiatric blogosphere, mostly from advocates of psychotherapy and detractors of psycho pharmacotherapy. Desperate to garner support for what I call sporkiatry, the practice of combining psychiatric medical treatment with psychotherapy (sporkology when performed by psychologists with prescribing privileges), they all seem to have ignored an article published in New York Times Magazine only a few days prior in which the author describes his multiple experiences of psychoanalysts falling asleep during his sessions.

Although I cannot recall ever having fallen asleep myself during a psychotherapy session I came close on a few occasions, and I know that the problem is not peculiar to psychoanalysts. However, regardless of how you feel about Dr. Levin's short patient encounters, I would be surprised to hear that he ever fell asleep during one of them, regardless of how "boring" (Danny Carlat's suggestion) or "unfulfilling" he may find medication management. (If you know of a psychiatrist who fell asleep while administering electroconvulsive therapy or transcranial magnetic stimulation, please report below.)

Blogger Carlat places more importance on the psychiatrist's job satisfaction than on what best serves the patient: "doing therapy is fun--it's involves getting paid for having interesting and intimate conversations with people." Or interesting dreams?

Blogger Steven Balt accuses Levin of "selfishness." [correction: Dr. Balt in his comment points out that the article, not Dr Balt himself, accuses Levin of selfishness.] Is Dr. Levin selfish to sacrifice the "fun" of psychotherapy? Balt still seems to think it's all about the session: feeling good about what goes on during the 50' hour rather than relief from symptoms outside the psychiatrist's office. Or maybe it's whether the psychiatrist reaches REM sleep.

According to blogger 1 Boring Old Man, "Days like Dr. Levin describes change you into a machine, and you become kind of brain dead." Might this result from sleep deprivation?

In contrast blogger Reidbord at least understands the proper purpose of psychotherapy:  "I’m a huge advocate of psychotherapy, yet I don’t recommend, much less provide, it for everyone.  It’s a treatment..."

It is not so much that these (we?) fallible professionals fell asleep in the course of their (our) work, but as the author points out, at least one psychoanalyst writing in a professional paper appeared to blame the patient. And it took the author's mother to raise the question of whether he might not have needed psychotherapy to begin with, underscoring the fact that almost no professional providing psychotherapy will likely tell the patient after the first interview, "Get outta here. You don't need treatment."

Everyone makes compromises and mistakes, and there is no perfect psychiatrist or psychotherapist, but I'll take a Dr. Levin, awake, alert and responsive, over a somnolent psychoanalyst any day.