What ?

I noticed the other day a help wanted ad for a “behavioral health specialist” — it makes as much sense as that car in the middle of the field. Back in the old days, when I was at the beginning of learning to do what I do, there was no such thing as a “behavioral health specialist” nor a “behavioral health center”. We aspired to be psychologists and psychotherapists and to work  in mental health clinics or in private practice. In the years since the advent of managed care,  “psychology” and “psychotherapy” have fallen out of favor for more corporate and scientific sounding terms like “behavioral science” and “behavioral health specialist”. Think about it — these terms call up notions of scientific specificity. 

Now I don’t know anyone who dreamed of becoming a behavioral scientist or behavioral health specialist when they grew up. There is something about the coldness of the terms, bespeaking laboratories and machines that doesn’t lead to the images that terms like psychology and psychotherapy can create. The word psychotherapy comes from the Ancient Greek words psychē, meaning breath, spirit, or soul and therapeia or therapeuein, to heal or cure. Thus the psychotherapist is the healer or nurse of souls. That feels dramatically different from “behavioral health specialist. 

The realm of the psychotherapist encompasses dreams, wishes, fantasies, art, passions, emotions, thoughts, relationships, myth, metaphor, fairy tales. Like the Roman god Janus, psychotherapy looks in two directions — backwards into the past and forward into the desired future. 

I remember talking with a behaviorist when I was first in graduate school. He told me he was not interested in how people describe themselves or their lives because “self report is unreliable”; he was only interested in observable behavior. Now admittedly this is a pretty radically behaviorist stance but it is the ground for behavioral science just as the ancient Greek psychopompos,  guide of souls, is the ground for depth psychotherapy. 

A Baptist preacher and a Russian Orthodox priest may both be Christian clergy with some common beliefs and a common point of origin, but their ways of performing their sacred roles have diverged enough that they hardly seem part of the same faith. So it is in mental health with behavioral health specialists and psychotherapists. We have a common root but the branches we each occupy have become so far apart that it becomes harder to discern that we are part of the same tree.