The Scientific Psychiatrist

Hello Readers, 

Just a few days back, I happened to think about what makes psychiatrists different from other healthcare professionals. My curiosity instead is about how to better one’s psychotherapeutic practice, thus making psychiatry a respected profession. From my point of view, it’s all about how one pursues the training. Medical sciences are by their very nature diverse. Among more than 50 different subfields and specialties, one finds it mind-boggling to make sense of the science. To be utterly honest, Psychiatry is variegated, broad, and nebulous. The trainee needs to understand the underpinnings of psychiatry, especially the neurobiological underpinnings of psychiatric disorders, and need to approach it scientifically. 

An aspiring psychiatrist should at the very core, know how to integrate various learning methods and integrate it both horizontally and vertically. Horizontal integration in a curriculum means that, in a particular subject, sequential topics are integrated into one module. For example, when we learn about obsessive-compulsive disorder, we learn about pathophysiology, etiology, phenomenology, and management; we integrate them into one topic. Vertical integration on the other hand aims to break down the barriers between the basic and clinical sciences to aid the student to learn in a better-enhanced method. To explain vertical integration, in the case of Addictive behaviors comorbid with OCD secondary to Frontal lobe dysfunction, one should be able to reason out the symptom constellation from a neurobiological perspective. The trainee can do so only with sound knowledge of basic sciences. 

One of the senior faculty at my Alma Mater used to always say this and I can’t stress it enough ever since he said it, “A psychiatrist should be twice as good as a physician as psychiatrists deal with the most complex system of the body, The elusive mind; which has an influence on and is influenced by various other bodily systems”.

So, my fellow mental health professionals, The future of Psychiatry lies in our hands. Let us sharpen our skills and be strong-minded to change the course of the field towards a better end. Global Psychiatric Association strives in this direction with all the support from you. Viva!