First, I may be mistaken, but a course in psychology would be (I didn't even know they issue such degrees at associate level!) an AS, not an AA.
Second, if you honestly cannot make the distinction between psychology and psychiatry and view whatever it was you learned in such a poor light, your teachers have most seriously failed you.
A trusted best friend is not a professional- they don't have the education or equipment to handle the whole host of very serious disorders.
The short answer is a psychologist is not a medical doctor and a psychiatrist is. They are both full of themselves. And perhaps it has changed but an AA degree in psychology used to be what was given 25 years ago. Alot of the degree program initials have been altered recently. I will look through my files though.
And a trusted friend doesn't have to be a professional. Active listening skills are often intuitive in these situations and clergy are trained in these skills. I think in the future we will find that all so called mental illness is simply physical in origin and that is what needs to be addressed. We are wasting time and money on drugs that are still a shot gun approach to therapy the only thearpy I have seen that is effective is short term CBT and it is really only a skilled guiding of a persons thought processes and disrupted thought processes are usually learned behaviors.
The Myth of Biological Depression
2000 UPDATES
"Brain scans cannot distinguish a depressed person from a nondepressed person and they have not located a cause for any psychiatric disorder. Indeed, they are mainly used in biopsychiatry to promote the profession to lay audiences by giving the false impression that radiological technology can distinguish between normal people and those with psychiatric diagnoses. The usual sleight of hand involves comparing photographs of a brain scan of a depressed patient and a nondepressed patient where there happen to be other differences between the two brains. Sometimes the differences simply reflect normal variation and sometimes they reflect drug damage. Brain scans cannot show differences between the brains of depressed and normal patients because no such differences have been demonstrated." Peter R. Breggin, M.D., in his book Reclaiming Our Children (Perseus Books, Cambridge, Mass., 2000), page 293.
"A serotonin deficiency for depression has not been found. ... Still, patients are often given the impression that a definitive serotonin deficiency in depression is firmly established. ... The result is an undue inflation of the drug market, as well as an unfortunate downplaying of the need for psychological treatments for many patients." Joseph Glenmullen, M.D., clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in his book Prozac Backlash (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000), pages 197-198.
2001 UPDATE
"Part 6/Psychiatric Disorders
"ENDOGENOUS DEPRESSION AND MANIC-DEPRESSIVE DISEASE
"Etiology
...
"Biochemical Theories The biogenic monoamines (norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine) are the key elements in these theories. ... However, the aforementioned CSF [cerebro-spinal fluid] findings have not been consistent; in some patients with depressive illness, the CSF concentrations of bioamine metabolites are entirely normal. Most of the neurochemical theories of depression have been the result of reasoning backwards from the known effects antidepressants on various neurotransmitters. ...serotonin and its pathways are currently most strongly implicated in the genesis of depression; however, the reader should be reminded that only a decade ago it was widely held that depletion of norepinephrine fulfilled this role. ...
"[T]he biogenic amine hypothesis...leaves several fundamental questions unanswered. ... Why are the therapeutic results so inconsistent with the use of tricyclic antidepressants, the MAO inhibitors, and the serotonin reuptake inhibitors, all of which should favorably influence the balance of biogenic amines at the proper receptor sites? And why are the clinical effects of these drugs delayed for weeks while the biochemical reactions are almost immediate? ... At the present time, it must be conceded that there is no reliable biologic test for depression. ...
Psychosocial theories ... Among patients with primary depressive disorders, life events of a stressful nature were found to have occurred more frequently in the months preceding the onset of depression than in matched control groups. In the study of Thomson and Hendrie, this was equally true of patients with a positive family history of depression and those without such a history. Nor did patients with endogenous depression differ in this respect from those with reactive depression." (In other words, even people with supposedly endogenous depression had good reason, in terms of life-experience, to feel despondent or "depressed.")
Maurice Victor, M.D., Professor of Medicine and Neurology, Dartmouth Medical School; and Allan H. Ropper, M.D., Professor and Chairman of Neurology, Tufts University School of Medicine, Adams and Victor's Principles of Neurology - Seventh Edition, McGraw-Hill Medical Publishing Division, New York, 2001, pp. 1616-1618.
