This is a very informative and interesting talk put together by Michael L. Peterson. Although I am a psychiatrist, I have always used his work as an educational tool. This talk is a must listen for anybody thinking about becoming a psychiatrist.
I am not a psychotherapist, and I don’t have any experience with psychiatry, but I have a background in anthropology, psychology, and political science. I would think that one of the major reasons I would recommend this talk is that it contains a lot of interesting insights into the psychology and sociology of psychiatry. It also includes what is probably the most accurate description yet of the social stigma attached to psychiatrists.
Psychiatrists are highly trained professionals whose primary responsibility is to diagnose and treat patients. As a result, most people who are considered mentally ill by the medical profession don’t receive the care they need to remain mentally ill. Psychiatrists, who can diagnose and treat disorders of various kinds, have a reputation of not being able to understand why people are behaving in a certain way. This reputation may be true, but it’s also a form of institutionalized racism.
Psychiatrists have a reputation of being hard to understand at times, but their main job is to diagnose and treat patients. This is true even for those professionals who actually have a background in psychology. Psychiatrists are trained in the art of diagnosing psychological disorders, but the training doesn’t necessarily help them understand why some of us are behaving in a certain way. This is especially true if the diagnosis is based on the patient’s self-reports rather than the patient’s actual diagnosis.
Psychiatrists, for example, are trained to see patients and their symptoms through a person’s lens. To understand why a patient is behaving in a certain way, as a psychiatrist, you have to look at the patient’s own behaviour. The psychiatrist sees the patients symptoms and tries to understand them. But instead, the psychiatrist is in charge of diagnosing psychological disorders. And if the psychiatrist gets it wrong, the patient ends up in a psychiatric facility.
So, the patients diagnosis is actually the psychiatrist’s diagnosis? Well, psychiatrists are trained to look at symptoms, not diagnoses. Psychiatrists are trained to see patients in a DSM-diagnostic way. But the reality is that no psychiatrist looks at diagnoses in a patient’s file, because diagnoses only come up in court cases. The court system is the only system in the world that actually uses the DSM to diagnose mental illness.
Psychiatrists are more than trained to look at symptoms, though. They also see the patient’s emotions and behaviors, so they can give a more holistic diagnosis. When I was a psychiatrist, I was also one of the first to diagnose a patient using a holistic approach. But that’s an option that only a few psychiatrists have, and not one that the court system offers. I think that makes it a little more difficult for people to use.
Psychiatrists are trained to look at the patient’s symptoms and behaviors and try to understand the root cause of their psychiatric illness. They are not trained to look at the patient’s personality or lifestyle, however. In other words, they are not psychiatrists, but psychiatrists without the training. This may be the biggest hurdle the field has to overcome. People like me and others who are in the field have struggled with getting patients to voluntarily participate in the diagnostic process.
Some people have a hard time with this. I’ve had a few patients who were really angry that they weren’t getting better, and the only way they could tell me how they were doing was to fill out a personality profile, which was a completely unnecessary process. They thought I was just going to give them a few pills and tell them to shut up.
The process was actually very bad, especially for those few people who were on the scene. The symptoms were: depression, anxiety, social withdrawal.
