Psychiatry needs help.
Mental health has become a national issue, as growing numbers of mentally ill people have filled our streets and our jails. Yet the public remains deeply skeptical of psychiatrists, our doctors best equipped to care for these patients.
In a 2012 Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans surveyed felt that medical doctors have "high" or "very high" standards of honesty and ethics. By comparison, just 41 percent attributed the same traits to psychiatrists, though psychiatrists are in fact medical doctors. That Gallup even separated psychiatry from the rest of medicine in the survey says a great deal about perceptions of the field.
Despite recent advances in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, many still view the work of psychiatrists as a kind of pseudoscience, somewhere between neuroscience and voodoo. A recent British study presented to the Royal College of Psychiatrists found 54 percent of surveyed patients did not know that psychiatrists have a medical degree. Even more troubling, 47 percent of these respondents said they would feel uncomfortable sitting next to a psychiatrist at a party.
These misconceptions have a crippling effect on mental health care. In the US, psychiatry remains among the least desired specialties to apply into, struggling every year to recruit new doctors. Psychiatry programs attract medical students with lower board scores and fewer academic honors on average compared to other specialties. Friends and family often deride applicants for choosing psychiatry, including me when I joined the field.
So at a time when we need psychiatrists most, we instead face a growing shortage of these critical providers. According to a study published last month in Health Affairs, the ranks of practicing physicians in the US as a whole increased by 14.2 percent between 2003 and 2013, whereas the number of practicing psychiatrists actually declined by 0.2 percent. Many patients with mental health needs face lengthy waiting times and difficulty getting the right care.
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Source material from Scientific American