that 130-180k was for academic jobs on the coasts. you could make more if you were in the midwest or somewhere else. this has nothing to do whether you're doing C/L or not, they pay is gonna be about the same and again, the vast majority of people are NOT doing full-time inpatient C/L even at academic medical centers - they are doing a bit of inpatient or outpatient etc as well. at smaller hospitals there just isn't enough work do have full time c/l and also at smaller hospitals its not as fun if your just seeing LOLs with delirium from UTIs the whole time. so basically the more prestigious the hospital (where they might get more fun cases) the less you will get paid. Getting paid well means demonstrating your value to the hospital. smaller hospitals may prefer nurse practitioners which i think is short sighted but such as it is. also you don't have to do research to do academics - most places have clinician/teacher academic tracks based on your teaching, curriculum development etc You might be expected to publish and present but this could be related to education or writing up case reports/series of fun cases you have seen. teaching is part of c/l (hence the liaison part) wherever you work.
outpatient consultation-liaison is where a psychiatrist is co-located in a specialty medical clinic or primary care seeing patients referred for evaluation and either sent back to the referring physician with recommendations or sent for follow-up elsewhere. depending on the clinic the psychiatrist might see patients for ongoing care. it is appointment-based, and not as fun as inpatient c/l in terms of dealing with acute medical illness and the hospital interface but you get to deal with a wide variety of problems. So I see some patients who dont have anything wrong with them, demoralization in the face of serious illness, adjustment disorders, people with poor adherence to their ARVs, substance use problems interfering with medical care, neuropsychiatric complications of HIV, have several patients who turned out to have dementias referred with "depression", "anxiety", anxiety disorders, psychosis, LOTS of personality pathology (mainly borderline/narcissistic). It is discouraged for psychiatrists to do therapy but I have a few brief therapy cases using supportive, cognitive-behavioral, and hypnotic interventions. Common areas for outpatient C/L include psycho-oncology, HIV psychiatry, transplantation, cardiology, pain, and diabetes. neuropsychiatry and perinatal psychiatry are other areas. Psycho-oncology includes lots of adjustment disorder, mood and anxiety disorders, chemo brain, and cancer related fatigue. But there might also be end-of-life issues, or managing cancer in patients with severe mental illness (e.g. patient with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia). HIV psychiatry is lots of addiction stuff, making sense of drug-drug interactions (less of an issue than you might expect), compulsive sexual behavior, adherence issues, coping, character disorder. Transplantation may involve psychosocial assessments for transplantation (but this is increasingly done by social workers), or pharmacological management in patients on complex drug regimens/organ failure, ethical issues (living donors etc), addictions, personality pathology. Cardiology is lots of depression/anxiety but also PTSD from ICD shocks etc. In primary care basically you just make recommendations for PCPs to manage their patients which can be very detailed (like "try x for 6-8 weeks, if that doesn't work try y, or if there is partial response augment with z") and provide lots of education and support. It's a slower pace but if you enjoy interacting with people from other specialties and providing consultation and education its good fun.
