I disagree!!!! That is what most of the PHD psycho-therapists, aka psychologists, that I paid, thought was their job. They just thought they were to be listeners. NO! NO!

Mental health professionals are paid to "CURE" mental health issues! It is a mental health professionals job to improve the quality of life of their patients by every means possible and as fast as possible!

Their main task during the first month of therapy is to be diagnosticians. Within the first or second month of therapy they should have a good idea, based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel, which category of mental health issues applies to the patient. Then based on that diagnosis they should advance with therapy to improve the quality of life/stabilize the patient as fast as possible.

I would suggest to all mental health professionals to develop a questionaire based on Maslow's Heirarchy of Human Needs that should be filled out by the patient during the first two visits. Then the therapist needs to help the patient in areas that are preventing him/her from having basic human needs, aka a job, healthy relationships, a sex life, etc. If you are not getting laid on a regular basis you are going to be depressed and no drug will cure it!! If the therapist immediately focuses on the patient's human needs then the patient's quality of life will start to improve quickly if the therapist is competent.

The idiotic questionaires that I filled out supposedly showed me to be depressed. I don't need to fill out a questionaire for that! As an engineer the questionaires that I filled out made me know right off the bat that I was dealing with incompetence. They are based on bad scientific logic. They simply are statistically categorizing each patient based on how other patients before answered the questions. That is bogus science.

I can pay a hooker to listen to me and she will relieve my sexual anxiety also for about the same hourly rate as a mental health professional. Or I could just go to a massage therapist to get my stress relieved. No, mental health professionals need to be better than that! I propose that mental health professionals be moved under the AMA and be regulated by them. I also believe that we need to make it a requirement to get into graduate school for psychiatry or psychology to have a Bachelor of Nursing Degree. That would weed out people who are not really mentally capable of dealing with the mentally ill.