Why are Psychologists Not Allowed to Prescribe Medications?
There are a number of reasons why psychologists are not allowed to prescribe medications and one of them is the insufficiency in training on pharmacology and medicine. The training of psychologists is primarily focused on studying human behaviour and mental processes. Secondly, most of the mental disorders do not require medications as there is a risk to their side effects.
It is known that other diseases such as epilepsy can produce psychiatric symptoms but psychologists do not have the training diagnose such diseases. Thirdly, psychiatrists clock more than 10,000 hours in psychopharmacology training while psychologists clock less than 500 hours in the same training (Hermans et al., 2019), thus the latter is lagging behind in prescribing psychiatric drugs.
There are two things to be done to allow psychologists to prescribe medication. The first measure is to revise the curriculum of psychologists to include more psychopharmacology training as well as medical diagnosis. The education and training infrastructure needs to be adjusted appropriately to ensure psychologists are competent in these areas.
The second measure is supervision since awarding such privilege to psychologists means it’s a pilot that need to be monitored before its allowed to take full flight on its own.
The advantages involved in giving psychologists prescription privileges include increase in access for mental health services, reduction in wait times to see a psychiatrist, and reduce the cost of treatment since the patient only sees one provider. The main shortcoming of this is the limited training of psychologists.
I think psychologists should be allowed to prescribe psychiatric drugs. Most patients prefer visiting only one provider as this increases the quality of care. Secondly, other professions in the medical field such as nursing assistants have been allowed to prescribe medicine after undergoing intense training so the same should apply to psychologists.
Thirdly, National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) reported that most patients rated the care of prescribing psychologists as very good (Rettner, 2012). Furthermore, in the states that have legalized prescribing psychologists, such as Louisiana, New Mexico, Illinois, Iowa and Idaho, have never had complaints to the Licensing Boards meaning they are equally
