There’s something that really bothers Stanford psychiatry professor Keith Humphreys. When he thinks of all the years he spends training the next generation of psychiatrists, the enormous investment in medical school and residency, he wants them to devote that education to taking care of people with serious mental illness.
But many of them instead set up a private practice, where they can charge $400 an hour in cash to help people who Humphreys calls “the worried well” — people who enjoy the self-exploration of therapy but do not necessarily have a mental health problem.
“A minute I spend training that person is a minute of my life wasted,” Humphreys said. “That very well trained person should be taking care of very, very troubled people. When they don’t, everyone who needs that care loses out.”
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