Being a psychiatrist means you would be helping people with their mental health and making them feel okay. It is much more than dealing with depression, people nowadays go through too much mentally and that is why we need good psychiatrists in this world. So if you have decided to become a psychiatrist, you would be doing a job that is worthy and honorable.
There are a few things that you would need to know before becoming a psychiatrist. Things such as what you would be doing exactly, how much you would earn, the career opportunities you would get and how exactly you will become a psychiatrist.
What is a Psychiatrist?
According to American Psychiatric Association, psychiatry is the medical branch that deals with diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental, emotional and behavioral disorders. The psychiatrist are the doctors that specialize in mental health.
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How To Become A Psychiatrist
Now we are back to our original questions and to the part you are here for. It can take more than 10 years to become a professional psychiatrist. There would be several training programs and schooling that you have to undergo to become a psychiatrist.Here we would teach you how to become the psychiatrist by following the common steps.
1. Get a Bachelor’s Degree
As usual, you would have to get a bachelor’s degree first to further practice psychiatry. You would have to get a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university. Psychiatrist should have a bachelor’s degree in order to pursue further education. Further they have to choose a pre med program to graduate, biology, chemistry and physics should be your major subject to graduate from.After this, students would have to prepare to crack the entrance exam. To get an easy entrance in a medical college, experiences such as volunteering at a medical health clinic, internship at a local hospital, joining psychiatric and pre med organizations should help as well. This would help a student to get familiar with psychiatry and patients as well. These kinds of experiences would also help you to get familiar with the work environment. Make sure you get the bachelor’s degree with good grades.
2. Apply to Medical School
Now that you have completed your graduation and got a degree, you must apply to a medical school. This would also involve taking an entrance test and clearing it with good marks to get the college of your choice.You must get a doctor of medicine (M.D) or doctor of osteopathy (O.D) degree before you can apply for postgraduate training in psychiatry. These programs would take four years to complete.The first two years of your program would teach you advanced anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, microbiology, and pathology. Whereas, the last two years of the programs would be devoted to clinical rounds where you would get experience working directly with the patients.
3. Obtain License
If you want to practice psychiatry, you would require a license. This rule is applied in almost all the countries. To get the license you would have to pass an exam as well. In these exams for obtaining a license, you would have to know how well you can apply the basic and advanced science concepts to the practice of medicine.The procedure of getting a license would vary from one state to another. They can also run background checks to ensure you have a good character.
4. Residency
Now the next step would be to take up the residency. There would be a four year long residency that you can take in a hospital or a clinic. Make sure you choose the clinic or hospital carefully and the one you want to work in future as well.During your residency, you would learn a lot of things such as chemical dependency, neurology, psycho-metrics. You would be spending time in a psychiatrist ward or a psychiatrist hospital. During this time period you would get to interact with patients with various mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, post traumatic stress disorder, dementia, obsessive compulsive disorder and many other issues.Although, the first few years would be focusing in general clinical rounds on family practice and after that you would be focusing on neurology. From this point, you would spend your resident years focusing in psychiatry followed by an outpatient psychiatry. During this time, you would learn about a lot of fields of psychiatry. This would help you to choose a specialty as well.
6. Get a license to practice psychiatry
The first license you have warned was to practice medicine after you have done your M.D or O.D. Now this one would be essential to practice psychiatry. You need to know that the rules and regulations of getting a license are different in each state or country. So you better check out the requirements and eligibility along with the whole process of getting the license as.
7. Certification
The next step would be to acquire a certification from the board of psychiatry in your country. Having a cervical would enhance your chance of getting the job at decent places whereas not having a certification might put your career in jeopardy. The certification would be legal for next 10 years and after that a psychiatrist should maintain it by taking continuing education courses annually.
Conclusion
Being a psychiatrist is a lot tougher than one can imagine, that is why you have to be ready to do all the hard work and be fully dedicated as well. It may be a long way to go if you are in school but once you start you would get to like it. So if you are ambitious enough, you must put your 100 percent into the studies and get your dream career as well. You might do a standard 9 to 5 job at a hospital or clinic, and the pay scale would be pretty good too. Overall being a psychiatrist worth all the aforementioned hard work and focus.That would be an end for our article and we hope the article was helpful for you. Thank you.
