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In Saving Talk Therapy: How Health Insurers, Big Pharma, and Slanted Science Are Ruining Good Mental Health Care, Enrico Gnaulati argues that good mental health care is reflected in the psychodynamic and humanistic traditions of psychotherapy but that these forms of treatment have been diminished in their availability due to a number of social and economic forces that are not focused on what is best for people with mental health problems but what is best for generating profits at pharmaceutical companies, increasing the revenue of insurance companies, and making it easy for academics to conduct and publish research and advance in their careers. I inferred from the title of the book that the author would proffer ways to save the psychodynamic and humanistic approaches to doing psychotherapy from these forces, but my inference was wrong. The book does not offer any practicable solutions to thwart and reverse this unfortunate now decades-long trend.
The author is a psychodynamically and humanistically oriented clinical psychologist and believes that those traditional therapies are the most effective, the most humane available, and also adequately supported by empirical research. In this book, he briefly discusses the origins of psychodynamic therapy and how various clinicians altered and improved upon it over the decades that psychodynamic treatments have existed. Psychodynamic psychotherapy became more widely available after World War II because it was viewed as having been useful to soldiers during the war and after it to help with trauma-induced mental health problems that soldiers experience. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) was created in this context, and its primary original purpose was to train mental health clinicians because of the dearth of qualified psychotherapists available after World War II. In fact, the NIMH even funded grants for psychoanalytic training, and I have known psychoanalysts over the years whose training was NIMH funded. Psycho