What is a Psychiatrist?
By: Manisha Asrani
A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry, the branch of medicine devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, study, and treatment of mental disorders. Psychiatrists are medical doctors who evaluate patients to determine whether their symptoms are the result of a physical illness, a combination of physical and mental ailments, or strictly mental issues.
There are a number of subspecialties in psychiatry that allow practitioners to focus on specific conditions or groups. These include addiction psychiatry, adolescent and child psychiatry, forensic psychiatry (the application of psychiatry in criminal, courtroom, or correctional settings), geriatric psychiatry (psychiatry for older populations), neuropsychiatry (mental disorders associated with nervous system injuries or disease), occupational psychiatry (psychiatry in the workplace, particularly occupations in which risk, danger, or grief are common), and psychosomatic medicine (the application of psychiatry in a medical setting, such as diagnosis and treatment of delirium).
Psychiatry is situated in a middle ground between psychology (the study of behavior and the mind) and neurology (the study of the brain and nervous system). In practice, a psychiatrist will consider symptoms of mental health conditions by assessing the impact of a disease, physical trauma, or substance use on a person’s behavior and mental state and by evaluating symptoms in association with a person’s life history and/or external events or conditions (such as emotional trauma or abuse). The approach, known as the biopsychosocial model, requires the psychiatrist to use multiple tools to render a diagnosis and dispense the appropriate treatment.
As with many medical conditions, the diagnosis of mental illness will often involve a process of elimination to explore and exclude all possible causes. Known as a differential diagnosis, the process would involve a combination of mental status examinations and biomedical tests to differentiate the presumed cause from others with similar symptoms. Mental status examinations (MSE) are an important part of the clinical assessment of a psychiatric condition. It is a structured way of observing and evaluating a person’s psychological function from the perspective of attitude, behavior, cognition, judgment, mood, perception, and thought processes.
Depending on the presumed condition, the psychiatrist would use a variety of psychological tests to establish the presence of characteristic symptoms and rate their severity. Based on the results, the psychiatrist would refer to the DSM-5 to see if the symptoms meet the diagnostic criteria for the mental disorder.
Overall, this provides a brief insight into who a psychiatrist is, different subspecialities that exist within the field, and the processes they follow to help a patient.
Work Cited
Cherry, Kendra. “How Is a Psychiatrist Different from a Psychologist?” Verywell Mind, http://www.verywellmind.com/psychiatrist-a-career-overview-2795641.
Choosing a Career in Psychiatry, http://www.psychiatry.org/residents-medical-students/medical-students/choosing-a-career-in-psychiatry.
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