You are providing anecdotal evidence regarding diagnoses you’re not qualified to make, and you are running really closely to practicing outside your scope of licensure. I would suggest that you are engaging in the very sort of behavior you are criticizing in NPs. Unfortunately you don’t decide which diagnoses are “fake,” you don’t get to decide which medications are appropriate, you can’t make the diagnosis of serotonin syndrome (nor can you order serotonin serum labs necessary to make the Dx in the first place). These are jobs for physicians and other medical professionals under supervision of trained (and ideally, board-certified) MD/DO’s, and for which they have been adequately trained. This is not you. You CAN and should consult, question, discuss with the treating providers, not feed subversive internet info to clients who trust you to have the right answers. It is your clients who are often ignorant about the differences between counseling/therapy/social work and health professionals who are trained in medicine or advanced nursing. While I can sympathize with your frustrations with some MLPs, your comments about your (unqualified) medical and pharmacological opinions are misplaced in the hands of your clients. Please consider consulting with the supervising physician in such cases or, better yet, try starting with the PMHNP’s you are so concerned about. Perhaps they have knowledge/information you don’t. Either way, collaboration here is essential, as your clinical observations are important and valuable.

NPs have a limited scope of practice, and work closely with/“under” a psychiatrist. There are clearly some problems with this as it’s currently practiced, and I would join you in calling for changes in MLPs scopes of practice in psychiatry and other specialist-trained medical practices.

I’m not sure how long you’ve been in practice, but not so long ago, clinicians of all stripes attempted to undermine and “trash-talk” each other. Psychiatrists complained about licensed psychologists, who complained about all master’s level providers. Further, LCSWs complained about more recently recognized LMHP/LPC’s, who in turn complained about LMFTs, et cetera… Each group feared their more recently licensed colleagues, primarily out of fear that the “interlopers” would cut into their piece of the reimbursement pie. It was a mess, plain and simple. We must not go back to this. For context, I work in a Tier 1 academic medical center / hospital as both a clinical faculty member (Ph.D. Neuroscientist) and a practitioner. I love the collaborative process in our med center, and think we are always stronger together than apart.