Personal History

After finishing graduate school in psychology I practiced for nearly 20 years in South Florida. My work was primarily in the area of Geriatrics and I worked closely with several local psychiatrists in the field and developed an interest in and appreciation for the medical aspects of mental health. In the 1990s I had hoped to enter the proposed psychopharmacology program for psychologists at the University of Florida, but this program never ended up taking off. This education would have been for my own edification as there was no provision for Clinical Psychologists to prescribe medication in the State of Florida. Despite the fact that other opportunities were beginning to emerge for education for psychologists in psychopharmacology, I decided that since I would not be able to prescribe medication in Florida, I would not pursue this time consuming and expensive post-doctoral training.

In 2010 I moved with my family from Florida to Idaho and after a few years the Idaho Legislature passed a bill allowing Clinical Psychologists with a post-doctoral Masters in Clinical Psychopharmacology to provide medical treatment for patients in Idaho. Thus, in 2017 I enrolled in the post-doctoral Masters program in psychopharmacology at Fairleigh Dickinson University. After two years of intense classes, the amassing of 400 hours of supervised “prescribing” (without actually being able to prescribe) psychotropic medications and finally passing the notorious PEP exam (that has an insanely high failure rate) I have recently been licensed to prescribe medication for mental health issues in Idaho.

Interestingly, the more I have learned about psychopharmacology, the less favorable I have become about the use of psychopharmacological medication…certainly as it is often used today. One of the very positive things about prescribing psychologists is that since we cannot even apply to enter a post-doctoral Masters program in psychopharmacology until we have been practicing as a licensed psychologist for at least two years, we have already learned about the value of psychotherapy as a treatment modality and do not have an impulse to immediately prescribe medication for emotional problems. Where it seems like “psych meds” are being prescribed to virtually everyone these days without any type of thorough evaluation by medical professionals, there are actually only a relatively small number of people for whom medication treatment is necessary. It is clear that where true mental illnesses (i.e. schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, moderate to severe major depression) benefit from treatment with medication and it is essential for them to function well, the vast majority of people are prescribed medication when it is unnecessary or at least should be held until it is clear that psychotherapy alone has not been sufficient to treat them. Thus, philosophically and practically, I am not a “pill pusher” and while I consider it a viable option in some cases for those who have not responded to psychotherapy alone, I would not advocate for treatment with medication alone under most circumstances.