eli5: What do psychiatrists do? They help you with mental issues but how? Are there any strategies, guidelines?
In: Biology
The most useful thing they do is to allow you to talk through your problems with someone who will listen to you and not overreact to what you say. In extreme circumstances if they recognise a serious problem they can prescribe drugs to help with some conditions, but for some poorly trained psychiatrists this is a first resort rather than a last one.
A psychiatrist is a doctor, they are trained as doctors and then specialized in treating and diagnosing psychiatric disorders, things like depresion, bipolar disorder, psychosis, schizophrenia etc… They know how to do mental therapy and pharmacological therapy, so they know what drugs each patient needs, how to control them properly etc… And diagnosis is one of the parts of their job and its incredibly important…
For example, a person with bypolar disorder is almost surely going to need to do treatment with lithium and mental therapy, he could get the mental therapy from somewhere else, but for the treatment with lithium, he needs a doctor to control it and make sure he is getting the exact dose he needs, which is a very complicated process… and if he were to get into a crisis, it would be a psychiatrist the ideal person to treat it… Long story short, they are the person specialised in dealing with psychiatric conditions, from things like depression to things like phobias, PTSD or schizophrenia…
They study things like th DSM-V, guides on diagnosis, on treatments and therapies and many more things
Psychiatrists prescribe drugs. They are medical doctors with an M.D. and then some extra time in specialty study. There are guidelines about what the “standard of care” is but since I’m neither an M.D. nor a psychiatrist I don’t know enough to go into detail there. The strategy is that psychological drugs have been studied in clinical trials for specific aliments and have been shown to be effective, so what you have, they can prescribe something for that.
There are strategies and guideline. The first thing to understand is that everyone is different… And yet everyone works the same. At the end of the day, we are a specie of advanced monkey. We have common ancestors. So while we are unique, our way of handling things are unique, our brain are unique, a lot of it is extremely similar.
For example, by default all our hands have 5 fingers. And they usually have a certain ration in terms of size compared to your torso. Well your brain (that handles emotions) is the same. We are pretty much all capable of emotions, and these emotions are similar. So a lot of things that apply to mister X also apply to miss Y.
The second thing is simply repeated studies. Most people have problems and emotions. But by studying how each of these person handled these problems and these emotions, you can, by comparing how many succeeded and how many failed. Now you have a basis to say “so, have you tried taking an extra nap? about 40% of the people with your problem that have started taking a nap and they are happier.” If it fails, take the second most likely answer and repeat until something works.
And the third thing is categorizations. Now, I know it’s controversial these days, but… We’re not THAT unique. A girl is a girl, a boy is a boy, a man of color is a man of color, etc, etc. Certain groups of people face a certain problem more often. As a result, when you fall within the boundaries of that group, it might be better to look at how people like you are coping with it. PTSD for a war veteran isn’t always handled the same way as a rape victim. Two rape victim, one man and a woman won’t go through the same thing because the perception of society of their issue is different. This is where our uniqueness becomes an issue. You are always part of a large amount of group. you are unique because of the combination of all these categories. And each of them can make it so the same issue someone else has can be coped differently.
On top of that, there are some issue that just bring you to self destruction. Ever seen the picture of a snake eating its tail? Well some issue promote themselve, consuming more and more of your sanity. In these case, breaking the loop is important but difficult. most of these loop are emotion based (sadness, anger and so on) and can be more easily broken with some drugs. This is also part of the arsenal of tools they have.
I hope this makes it a bit more understandable.
Psychiatrists go to medical school, where they learn everything about the whole body, including anatomy, physiology, histology, pharmacology, pathology, etc.
Then they do a residency in psychiatry where they narrow down their training to focus just on the brain and mental health. There is plenty of science to learn about mental health, the problems that can arise, and how to solve them, and that’s what psychiatrists study.
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