To do Medicine for Psychiatry or to do a Psychology based degree?

[sampras]

Hey all

I am just wondering if anyone else has been thinking about this before?

I am very interested in the area of Mental Health and I am trying to decide whether I should try and get into Med School with the eventual aim of qualifying as a doctor followed by training in Psychiatry or alternatively, to pursue a Psychology based degree and thereby concentrate fully on the Psychology side of things. I have not studied either before but I have a University degree already so I will be able to apply to Graduate programmes aswell as Undergrad.

I have been mulling this over for so long (a few years!) and have talked to others to see what they think and I am still in two minds about it!

The basic pros of the Medicine route as I can see are:

-You can prescribe medication to patients.

-If during the years of study, your area of interest changes, there are plenty of routes open to you once you qualify as a doctor.


The basic pros of the Psychology route:

-It could be quicker (although I am not sure of this. Someone told me that to become say a Clinical Psychologist, it could take about 8 years from start to finish. I have also heard that places on a lot of schemes are very limited.)

-If your area of interest is mental health, you would be studying material which you are interested in during your degree. In a medicine degree, you may begin to feel that you are studying material that will have no relevance to your future career.

One possible con of Psychology that I have heard is that is very "statistics based" when you are studying it and you spend more time on research than with actual patients. Again, I am sure this probably depends more on the type of psychology you go into.

Anyway, it would be really great to hear any thoughts or experiences that others may have had.

Apologies for the very long post but thanks for reading!

[sampras]

Hi Dentist,

Thanks for your reply to my post and sorry for the very long delay in writing back to you. Your post is really informative and it is really good to hear another person’s perspective as it can definitely shed some new light on things. It is interesting what you say about psychology degrees not being centred around patients (or not containing much abnormal psychology). That is an angle that I have not heard of before and one that is actually quite a big thing. I suppose with a medicine degree, you are being trained in how to relate to and help patients from the very beginning and this can only be beneficial no matter what field you choose to specialise in.
I have thought a lot more about it and whilst I am still a bit unsure, I think I am swaying towards the medicine route. If at the end of the degree I am still interested in psychiatry, then I can specialise in it. On the other hand, if another strand of medicine were to appeal to me after studying it in the degree, I have the option to do that too. It seems more definite than the psychology route and at the same time provides a lot more options. I spoke to a doctor recently who said there is some part of medicine to suit all students after they finish so I suppose it’s a case of finding out as you go along.

The hard part now is actually getting in!

Thanks again for the reply and all the best in the future to you too...

[Leo2004]

Sampras,

I think you have made a good decision! I have many interests in health from emergency medicine
and preshospital care to anaesthesia and intensive care to general medicine to (forensic) psychiatry and neurology to (forensic) pathology to virology and infectious disease and intrernational health and medical aid work.

An undergraduate training in medicine will give you
an undergraduate grounding in all but the last two subjects, all of which are of benefit to potential patients. Possession of the MBBS will theoretically give you the chance to do some work in all of these areas as a postgrad.

You therefore have a chance to try things out as the very junior doctor and work out which of these you actually enjoy as far as how the job works.

Alternatively, if you then find you're interested in research, there are many schemes for doctors which combine work as a physician with a research training. On top of this, if you wish to go research fulltime, you could take phds in anything from neuroscience to any of the biomedical science disciplines as well as some special translational/clinical science disciplines.

AFAIK from some colleagues, there are some great psychology degrees out there varying from heavily non clinical research oriented to more clinically themed ones.

The main patient-related job, which allows you to work with psychiatrically ill patients, is that of clinical psychologist.

This involves usually doing an MSc after your BSc in psych, then probably working as an 18k/yr junior psychologist for a year, before applying for the extremely competitive 3 year professional doctorate in clin psych, so 8 years to completion. If you get into this you will be a salaried NHS employee. After this you will work at varying levels of seniority with 'consultant' clin psych being the boss, with earnings similar too, but perhaps a bit lower than a consultant psychiatrist.

Good luck in whatever you decide and the application!