Are you counting "on call" time when you aren't seeing patient, when you are studying for boards, etc.? The "80 hours a week" numbers get thrown around, but if you actually look at patient contact hours and actual psychiatric training and work.....the numbers are far far less.
Ahh, excellent point. 80 hours is pretty standard within the intern (first) year, but subsequent years probably are more like 60 hours on average.
At 50 weeks per year that comes out to (on average, of course some aspects will vary between programs):
Year 1: 4,000 hours
Year 2: 3,000 hours
Year 3: 3,000 hours
Year 4: 3,000 hours
Total (just in residency) = 13,000 hours
Boards studying time is not protected or separate time, and must be crammed in, usually in the minutes between patients or on your off time.
Medical school usually has a minimum of 1-2 months of psychiatry clinical rotation, plus an elective or three for anyone wanting to go into it. You can do the math on that. The harder to measure is all the direct clinical exposure occurring in non-psychiatric settings (primary care, surgery, internal medicine, etc.), where assessment and reassurance and actual clinical skills are being developed. Also the multiple classroom courses on neurophysiology, psychopathology, neurology.
Now T4C brings up interesting points, which really speaks to the variability amongst all clinical training -- how much of "clinical" time is actually spent in front of a patient? Of the 13,000 hours, you can probably eliminate 10-15% for didactics during residency. But what about all the other variation? Don't residents sleep on call? Depends on the hospital. I had maybe 1-2 nights during all of intern year that I got any sleep. Usually I was seeing multiple emergency room evaluations of suicidal, intoxicated, or acutely psychotic patients, or pure BS consults, while doing several admissions to an inpatient unit and fielding pages from multiple services for Floor consults and other ER consults. But what about all the other time? What qualifies as a "patient-hour?" Do you take out documentation time? No-show's? Does supervision count? This probably erodes Actual hours in all clinical training programs regardless of degree. What no one can say is if it erodes it proportionally between programs.
But I maintain that the total hours of patient exposure during training, on average, is far higher for a psychiatrist than for a psychologist. Psychologists of course can say they spend far more
Classroom hours learning about mental illness. No one has ever shown that classroom hours maps out to better clinical outcome (and I'm not sure they have for patient-hours either). But to make a statement that psychologists are far better trained at diagnosis and treatment of mental illness is weighing classroom hours a lot, or that diagnostic instruments are far superior to a skilled clinical interview (which I would then ask to see data to support such a supposition).
But of course that then begs a good researcher to look beyond pure numbers. Jon Snow and I have discussed this several times on SDN, and the focus of training is quite different. Psychiatrists spent a lot of their training seeing the most severe aspects of mental illness -- when someone is severe enough to come into an emergency room or a be hospitalized. This means the most severely depressed, suicidal, psychotic, manic, anxious, somatic, and medically ill patients. They have far less training during residency in psychotherapy than psychologists. So I would make the argument that psychiatrists have superior training, again on average, in the breadth and extremes of all of mental illness, but may miss many subtleties in long-term management of the individual. Psychologists spend more hours per patient, likely giving them a better understanding into the depths of an individual. But they may have to extrapolate (after training) from the far fewer patients they've seen but understand quite well, to understand many clinical pictures they've never seen. This is the argument for how the fields should complement each other. To say one is superior is erroneous. To suppose that because of more classroom learning in mental illness without equivalent hours and supervision in the extreme presentations of mental illness (not to mention basically NO medical training that's so so necessary) that a psychologist would then be superior in use of medications to other medical professionals is again extrapolating from a narrow but well honed group of skills into areas that they just don't apply.