So with this being the beginning of the second half of psychiatry, I can tell you wholeheartedly that I will not be a psychiatrist. I’ve noticed some huge differences between medicine and psych. To start, I feel like even though I worked longer hours during my internal medicine rotation, I wasn’t nearly as tired when I left and maybe that’s because I was physically tired and not mentally and emotionally exhausted. I’ve said before that it amazes me how thin the line is between sane and well not, how hard it can be for people to understand the difficulties that these patients go through, and how the person who’s taking care of them, or people I should say, have to be incredibly patient and compassionate while keeping a healthy boundary. During this rotation, I haven’t been able to find that balance. When I leave physically from the unit, I haven’t left mentally. I continue to think about my patients, many of which are psychotic and believe that I am in someway working against them, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
I find myself constantly on guard, not even being able to turn it off when I get home, and I’ve become a lot less talkative because I talk all day with my patients. I’ve abandoned a lot of the prescreened questions that we’ve been told to ask and I have started to ask questions of patients and allow me to learn more about them and about what they like and about what makes them human. At the end of the day when I come home, I like to think of my patients as said person who enjoys these activities or who has this favorite food instead of the person with this disease who has the symptoms. I feel like in psychiatry I’ve witnessed so many people who allow the disease to become what they’re treating instead of remembering that they’re treating a person with the disease. You see this everywhere, in all specialties, but here it’s so much more difficult because these patients’ entire lives revolve around their interactions or lack there of due to their illness. While this is a really interesting opportunity, I’m definitely sure that psychiatry is not for me.
