A family member has suffered for a long time with a mental disorder that included major depression and even a serious suicide attempt. For a large part of her

A family member has suffered for a long time with a mental disorder that included major depression and even a serious suicide attempt. For a large part of her life therapy was drug-focused. It was very difficult to achieve consistency, both for the patient and for the care-givers (medicine changes, hope of better optimizing medications, changing insurance coverage, etc). Only since she has also been receiving talk therapy (including CBT) in addition to some drugs has she seen serious improvement and a better ability to rely on herself and make good decisions when it gets difficult. Talk therapy is expensive, but the cost of medications can also be extremely high, and the cost to the family and society when things goes wrong can also be huge. In many cases medicine works wonders... but there are a lot of disorders (e.g. personality disorders like borderline) where medicine has far less of an impact (none or only treat some very specific symptoms). I'm really optimistic about our developing knowledge about brain chemistry and developing newer and better treatments, but it is very naive to think that they can solve problems with drugs that are fundamentally interpersonal issues. It's very difficult to resist the sexiness of replacing hours with a therapist with a pill, especially in a profit based health system.