"Excellent - highly recommended"
George Albee, a pioneer of preventive psychology, passed away on July 8, 2006 after a brief illness. A former president of the American Psychological Association, he was the current president of the Division of General Psychology of APA. He was known throughout the world for his scholarship, caring for others, and sense of humor.

Carlos Zalaquette interviewed George just 40 days before his death. In this session, we meet George, the person and the professional, and learn of his lifetime commitment to social change. He explains how counseling and therapy focus on victims and survivors of a system that constantly injures the human psyche without addressing causes of that distress. Ethical psychology and counselling, on the other hand, emphasizes prevention. Albee shows the why and how of prevention and what it can do to make a difference to the study of psychology.

He believed that any intelligent person with an open mind could see how wrong the current approach of our society to mental/emotional disorders actually is.
Most of these conditions are not diseases caused by biological defects or brain pathology. Those are false explanations advanced for economic, political and/or power motivations.

Besides that, individual one-to-one treatment, even when successful, has little or no effect on the rate of the condition in the population. We have learned from Public Health that no disease or disorder has ever been treated out of existence. Despite this knowledge most of medical education, medical research, medical treatment focuses on individual treatment. Little attention is paid to prevention.

He believed that psychiatry as we know it is twice wrong. It is wrong about cause and wrong about treatment. Psychological practice, tied irrevocably and financially to the errors of psychiatric diagnosis and pharmaceutical treatment, is ultimately doomed.