So my nurse today said that in the next 5 years mental health will change. That psychiatrists are few in number and not anyone is going to school for psychiatry because of high costs and low pay. At the place I go they lost 2 psychiatrists, one of which was mine. And the only ones left were pulled out of retirement from low psychiatrist staff. My nurse says the county is planning to use nurses with strong psychiatric backgrounds to monitor the symptoms of patients. Her and I even had a little discussion on how counselors and therapists tend to be on the older side so the don’t really connect with younger people and tend to have issues that stand out themselves. I admit that describes my counselors that I’ve had in the past and it took me to the third one to get anything useful out of a counselor. And this ties in with psychiatrists, as I’ve heard some people say they are quick to diagnose and visits are short and seemingly uninformative to the psychiatrist themselves. Sitting there mumbeling a obscure question or two and they send you on your way. So hopefully as things change it’s for the better. Take care.
I think more and more nurse practitioners are being used, It certainly seems to be the case with those of us who fall into the chronic, non acute, category. I am under one with the ability to change medication if needed. Recourse to a consultant would only occur in the event of a (acute) crisis.
For a long time now I’ve lived under the impression that psychiatrists are not really doctors, they resemble practitioners in a lot of ways. They really have no idea what’s going on in their patient’s brains, they don’t measure anything and they simply prescribe some medicine based on what patients say they feel. That hardly requires any advanced training to become an MD. My pdoc for example hasn’t read a scientific paper in ages, and he keeps telling me that I’ll get better I’ll get better, that I must exercise and make an effort, whereas I try to convince me that it doesn’t make any difference in my form of illness. To be honest, it was I who told him about “deficit schizophrenia”, he hadn’t even heard of that before. Thank God we have internet and I was able to find out more about my illness than my pdoc will ever be able to comprehend.
How do you measure what we go thru? It’s not like taking a bp, temp, or physical symptoms. Our symptoms are more subjective and transient. They can only treat based on what we tell them we are experiencing.
I’ve been seeing a nurse practitioner for a couple years now
I have a nurse too.
Aptly expressed.
I will like this change. I always have had better experiences with nurses. I think that because they actually deal with patients, they are more empathetic sometimes.
I always feel like pdocs don’t see me as a person but as a list of symptoms. Often times, they don’t seem to really know who they are talking to which I find degrading and upsetting. I also heard that there was a shortage of pdocs from a therapist. Hopefully things will improve.