To Svas and others like you:
You inspire me with your personal and professional wisdom and your scientific reasoning.
You are the kind of physician that I admire and aspire to become:
a good PHYSICIAN not a medical fundamentalist.
I am completing my psychology residency and beginning pre-med with the intention of entering med school in a couple of years and eventually completing a psychiatry residency.
I am doing this because I am committed to the biopsychosocial model of healthcare and want to be a mental health provider who is able to fully integrate the biological and behavioral dimensions in patient assessment and intervention. I also rather do this in the next 10 years than wait to do in the next 20 or 30. I agree with you that RxP for psychologists is coming but it will probably take a few decades, as evidenced by how long it has taken other healthcare practitioners to gain RxP, e.g. NP.
However, I do totally support RxP for psychologists and believe that post-doc training in psychopharmacology (using the APA/DoD formula) will result in medical psychologists who will be able to function effectively and safely as both psychotherapists and psychopharmacotherapists. If I was willing to move to NM or LA or if RxP came to FL that is what I would do.
In the mean time I intend to personally live up to the challege of two great psychiatrists, George Engel and Lawrence Kubie. I also intend to continue to support professional psychology's evolution in the Engel/Kubie paradigm and challenge professional psychiatry's reactionary attachment to the medical fundamentalist paradigm.
Engel's biopsychosocial model and Kubie's "medical psychology" model (it was he who in 1954 proposed that new discipline which was meant to integrate psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, and social work and which resulted in the establishment of a Doctor of Mental Health degree in 1973 at UC Berkeley and San Francisco but which ended being abolished in 1986 in part due to the opposition of med fundas to any RxP for any non-physicians) has been slowly but progressively inspiring psychology to enter into the healthcare field not only as academicians and researchers but as clinicians, resulting in the establishment of the PsyD degree for those most trained to be practitoners while retaining the PhD degree for those most trained to be scientists.
Of course, it's not just psychologists who have embraced the biopsychosocial model. Despite the opposition of med fundas, NPs and others are gaining a seat at the multi-disciplinary treatment team table, including RxP. Today NPs have RxP in all 50 states, including independent and full formulary practice in 11 states and DC.
Interestingly enough, there is NO evidence that patients are being harmed by getting prescription meds, including controlled substances, from non-physicians in those 12 jurisdictions where NPs don't have supervision from MD/DOs. By the way, some of those NPs are PhD/PsyDs who have undertaken post-doc training in nursing.
Also interestingly enough, there is NO evidence that patients are being harmed by DoD psychologists, all of whom prescribe independently in the military and some of whom actually supervise the prescribing of psychiatry residents in the armed forces.
Imagine that!!! People being judged on their knowledge and skill and not on whether their doctorate in medicine is allopathic, osteopathic, behavioral, etc.
Med fundas are bound to go the way of other ideologues who demand special privileges without evidence as to why they alone should be accorded them.
They remind me of the male chauvinists who wanted to deny women the right to vote, the white supremacists who wanted segregation/apartheid, religious bigots who wanted their beliefs to be the official state ones, etc.
Ultimately, it is those who demand privilges for themselves that must DEMONSTRATE why their proposed discrimination should be enshrined in law.
Why should 4 years of med school and 4 years of psychiatry residency be the ONLY way for a clinician to be able legally to prescribe psych meds???
The evidence DOES NOT DEMONSTRATE that the current psychiatrist model is the only one (note the NP model and the DoD psychologist model) nor the best one. LET'S STOP THIS UNFAIR DISCRIMINATION...NOW!!!
Many MD/DOs already have and the LA RxP model may well further enhance collaboration between non-psychiatrists physicians and psychologists. A collaboration that may well result in patients receiving comprehensive and compassionate physical and mental healthcare; even if it does not involve hubris consumed psychiatrists asking in vain why others do not see their superiority.
Like you said, the train is coming. As a soon to be psychologist I'm glad for psychology as a future psychiatrist I'm concerned for psychiatry. Hopefully we'll all be on the train.
Again, to you Svas and others like you I say: THANKS.
To my future psychiatrist colleagues I say:
We can all be good physicians without being medical fundamentalists.
BTW, Does anybody wonder how much the premiums would be for a psychologist to get mal-practice insurance? 
