What Psychiatry Is (and Is Not)

I am a forensic psychiatrist with over thirty years of clinical experience. During these years of practice, I have interviewed patients and criminal suspects from all walks of life. Many of these persons had erroneous or incomplete knowledge concerning the medical discipline of psychiatry.

The following points are offered to clarify the training of a psychiatrist and the practice of psychiatry.

1. Psychiatrists are allopathic or osteopathic physicians, who after medical school complete a four-year residency in general psychiatry. Board certification requires passing both a written and oral examination.

2. After residency, a psychiatrist may take a fellowship in a psychiatric sub-speciality, e.g. forensics, addiction, child and adolescent, geriatric. Board certification in any sub-speciality also requires additional examinations.

3. Psychiatrists diagnose and treat mental diseases/disorders, e.g. schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, major depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar mood disorder.

4. Psychiatrists are not secular clergy. Psychiatry, because it is a medical speciality (just as rheumatology or internal medicine) cannot provide its patients answers to existential questions concerning the ultimate meaning of human life.

5. Psychiatrists cannot make their patients feel happy all the time for the simple reason that it is not normal to feel happy twenty-four seven. People confuse joy with happiness, but that is grist for my next blog.

Staying Alive (Sorry Bee Gees)

The United States House of Representatives has passed a bill that allows a child who is born alive to live despite the best attempts of a “physician” to kill him or her. Presently, abortions up to the time of delivery are legal in the United States if said birth endangers the “health/mental well-being of the mother”.  The United States alone among other countries is radical in its law that allow the killing of unborn children far beyond the point of “viability”.

Six democrats voted in support of this bill.  Of the three natural law values stated in the Declaration of Independence, “life” is foremost.  The democrats who voted against not killing an infant born after a botched abortion do not specify the means of killing the child.  On what grounds do they assign this child the death penalty?  What is the most humane means of killing?  Decapitation, exsanguination, airway compromise, stabbing, or merely neglect?

These same democrats propose to be our moral arbiters in respect to immigration, child care, and race relations.  I submit they have forfeited their purported moral superiority,