As a first-year medical student, there is nothing quite as exciting as your first-ever clinical placement, where you can finally feel like a doctor in training. That is, unless you’re placed in psychiatry. Having learnt how to perform numerous examinations and procedures such as taking blood, your placement is a chance to finally put these skills into action on real patients.
With psychiatry, however, the emphasis is on developing the skill of speaking to patients and taking detailed histories, with little – if any – practice of procedures and examinations. You must learn to understand and evaluate a person’s thoughts, emotions, and experiences, to lead towards diagnosis, treatment and management. Attempting to decipher the complexity of the human mind, while taking in to account biological and social aspects? Quite unnerving.
[For more of this story go to http://www.theguardian.com/hea...health-problems-real]
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