Quote:
Originally Posted by WeepingWillow23
Unfortunately IME I've found healthcare professionals can be just as stigmatising as everyone else. Psychiatry, for example, doesn't always attract the best and brightest, but often the Drs who couldn't handle other areas of medicine. Four people that I personally know from medschool went into psychiatry, only one of them because she genuinely had an interest in it (unfortunately she later burnt out and left medicine completely). The other 3 went into psych because they couldn't do what they really wanted to do as it was too competitive and/or challenging.
Whilst psych is challenging emotionally, it's often seen as an 'easier' option in terms of on call rotas and the professional exams aren't seen as so difficult. In medschool we used to call those pdocs '40 percenters' ie they just scraped a pass through medschool. It's really terrible! However, there are a few good ones out there who are bright and interested in their profession and want to help their patients. Unfortunately IME you have to wade through a lot of garbage to find them :/
Btw, neither of those girls got onto a clinical psychology doctoral programme yet  But they do still work in mental health fields...
*Willow* |
That' makes so much sense to me now. I can see how it would mainly attract the ones who couldn't make it into the more competitive programs, because when you think about it, they don't do surgeries, they don't deal with medical issues like diabetes, high blood pressure, infections, cancer (you see other doctors for those issues), and they don't do any real diagnostic medical tests. I ran into my fair share of monumentally abysmal psychiatrists and especially psychiatric nurse practitioners. i also wonder if some of them go into psychiatry for the authority and power it gives them. They literally have the power to take away a person's freedom and to force them to take medications against their will. imagine if a primary care physician had the power to incarcerate an overweight patient until they lost weight, and force them to take insulin shots while they were incarcerated AND still force them to take insulin shots when they were released to go back home. Now that is a tot of power to give one person.
Some of the main coping skills I have learned are what NOT to do in public, what NOT to say to other people, behaviors to avoid around others, etc. In essence, how to keep myself from being put back in a psych ward. This is where it helps to have a good behavioral therapist-- a psychologist rather than a psychiatrist.
The neuroleptic drugs have such nasty side effects that I wonder if anyone can stay on them for life without serious consequences to their health and ultimately their longevity. But for some people they can't seem to cope without them. I'm definitely pro-choice when it comes to psych meds. I believe there should be informed consent about the side effects and the withdrawal symptoms if they ever decide to stop taking them. I was caught off guard by the withdrawals. They were worse than anything I had experienced from opioids.