What we’ve said about The psychiatrist's role

“we operate within the medical model. And in short, it means that we look for pathology. We look for a problem that might be defined medically or has been defined medically. that has specific treatment recommendations, okay”

“I don't view my role as fix the problem, make the person happy, and everything's great with medications. I view my role as, in a sense, I'm communicating to them their options, the options I'm willing to prescribe because I don't think that, I think that the benefits outweigh the negatives”

“your job is to give advice and to lend expertise to in a pretty much neutral fashion rather than putting weight on the scales in one direction or another”

“in psychiatry, in voluntary psychiatry and also in pediatrics, the patient is not always the agent of the treatment. Sometimes the agent of the treatment is a family member, society at large, the law, anything”

“I think you should be both harder and easier on yourself. I think you should be easier on yourself in the sense that you are not there to please the person in front of you necessarily”

“We don't actually have that much ability to change outcomes. We're a small piece of this system, this machine, and most of what happens with patients is determined by actions of people who are not you”

“We cannot really control or prevent bad outcomes. We're going to see suffering. We're going to want to change it and we're not going to be able to change it. That's life”

“is really protective because, as you're saying, it gives you the freedom to actually provide the best care to everyone because you're not overextending yourselves in ways that aren't productive for the patient”

“it's such a helpful thing to realize, to know your limitations and to be, in a sense, confident and humble in your limitations. And that you can say, the things you're bringing up, they're important”

“we really do need to be genuine in how little power we have uh to help people and then that's where we can actually start helping people if we can say to them You know, this is basically what I can do for you”

“You really got to know what the general effect size of SSRI is. You shouldn't oversell it, right? Because if you oversell it, you're going to give people the false impression that this is a powerful medication that's going to change your problems”

“You'll have to tell me if it's something that's helpful for you or not. Mm-hmm. And that's going to be different with every patient”

“the patient-clinician relationship is one where the patient comes in with a lack, okay? There's something that they're lacking or they don't have and that your job as a clinician is to find that thing and give it to them”

“they might, for example, think that you're what they think is a therapist, right? That instead of trying to figure out what is medically going on and to recommend treatments and to lead them through those treatments, that you're there to listen, for example”

“The psychiatrist is used to finding pretty discrete pathologies often and fixing them. And for people who want to optimize or don't have specific pathologies – psychiatrists and the role of medication management and all that entails might not it's not the best treatment for everyone and that's okay”

“first year residency is inpatient, where it feels like your entire job is get patient to take medication. And sometimes that can spill over into the future outpatient years. And that's not our role”