how much psychology will you learn as a psychiatrist?

[maomaonow]

I know this may sound like a dumb question but I'm an aspiring psychiatrist trying to figure out what to major as an undergrad (and I need to figure this out fast).

I'm considering psychology because it sounds like psychiatry teaches you more about the medical aspect vs. emotional and mental. Would majoring in psychology as an undergrad help me become a better psychiatrist? I want to understand and be able to treat my patients emotionally as well as medically. How much psychology do you learn in medical school and during your residency?

Thanks!

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[atsai3]

I know this may sound like a dumb question but I'm an aspiring psychiatrist trying to figure out what to major as an undergrad (and I need to figure this out fast).

I'm considering psychology because it sounds like psychiatry teaches you more about the medical aspect vs. emotional and mental. Would majoring in psychology as an undergrad help me become a better psychiatrist? I want to understand and be able to treat my patients emotionally as well as medically. How much psychology do you learn in medical school and during your residency?

Thanks!

The training may vary depending on the psychiatry residency program. In our program we learned about attachment theory, schema theory, object relations, mindfulness, etc. which I would assume are studied in psychology curricula. But in our program we learned very little about things like perception, attention, motivation, language, etc. or about the psychological experiments used to obtain data on these processes; and we learned little about subfields like social psychology, evolutionary psychology, etc. Again I'm not a psychologist but I assume these would be covered in psychology curricula (depending on your coursework choices).

There are a lot of possibilities for career deviations between now and 10 years from now. You might decide not to go to medical school. Or you might go to medical school and decide to become a surgeon. Or you might decide to go to psychiatry residency but specialize in forensics or lab research or decide to cease your involvement in direct clinical care. It's admirable that you want to tailor your undergrad education to your future intended field, but there is also a strong argument to be made for majoring in whatever interests you most.

 

[whopper]

Based on my experiences as a resident and the general knowledge I see from colleagues who went to other programs....very little. This is coming from a guy who got a bachelor's in psychology.

There are several things in psychology that are relevant to the treatment of mental health not taught in psychiatry. In addition to above, abnormal psychology, statistics, the voluminous empirical data concerning the connection between lack of control and anxiety, aging and development, physiological psychology, neurological psychoendrocrinology, among several other things I cannot think of right of this moment have strong implications in clinical treatment and several aspects of the above are not taught in psychiatry.

I have not yet met another psychiatrist that actively asks patients with anxiety disorders if there's something they feel there's something out of control in their lives other than their anxiety that could be causing the excessive anxiety.

I have not seen many psychiatrists factor in the patient's position in life, age, and background in making evaluations. E.g. a Caucasian male, recently retired, depressed, and with a lot of free time on his hands--well that begs the question of a narcisstic injury. A woman in her late 30s, no children, not married, that begs the question as to loneliness. While much of this is common sense, many psychiatrists I see simply view this as simple diagnosis, then giving a medication. Had these psychiatrists took an aging and development class, I'd bet a significantly increased number would factor these into the case.

IMHO, psychiatry, in fact medical education in general, is lacking on several things because in residency, attendings are more concerned with residents running units well instead of studying. Residents, for example, are often-times excused from lecture when they are post-call, or fall asleep right through it and understandably so if they did not get sleep the prior night. Material taught in lectures is often not tested. The big mother-of-all-test residents worry about is the USMLE that only superficially touches psychiatry and mental health, and while the board exam does cover stuff like this, this is only a once in a lifetime experience for most residents, and they study to pass the exam, not to learn mental health treatment for real.

 

[splik]

I'm considering psychology because it sounds like psychiatry teaches you more about the medical aspect vs. emotional and mental. Would majoring in psychology as an undergrad help me become a better psychiatrist? I want to understand and be able to treat my patients emotionally as well as medically. How much psychology do you learn in medical school and during your residency?

Thanks!

You should major in what you will enjoy the most and if you want to go to medical school what you think you will give you the best GPA.

I am not sure what you mean about treating patients 'emotionally'?!!
Psychiatry is the medical specialty that treats patients with cognitive, behavioral and emotional disorders. We don't treat patients emotionally and neither do psychologists! If you mean psychologically,well that is a different thing and good psychiatrists are physicians of psychological medicine (to use a British term) and will be familiar with developmental, cognitive, behavioral, dynamic, existential, and ego psychology approaches.

Psychology is a modernistic positivistic reductionistic and technical enterprise just as medicine and psychiatry are. I have no doubt that having a better understanding of cognition, learning, memory, perception, interpersonal attraction, cognitive, moral, emotional and psychological development, personality, individual differences and other things psychologists learn will be useful to you as a psychiatrist but I'm not sure its what youre looking for and it won't necessarily make you any better.

You would be better off majoring in english or a humanities subject if you are interesting in understanding about love, hate, fear, jealousy, grief alienation, despair and madness in a deeper way. Freud after all is just another storyteller in the tradition of the modernists, and you will learn a helluva lot more psychiatry reading Shakespeare, Sophocles, Woolf or Dostoyevsky than you will by reading Kaplan and Sadock or indeed any psychologist (William James excepted of course, you can't go wrong with him and its all here to read free!).

 

[whopper]

Agree with the above though I do recommend that while in undergrad someone take several of the classes they encounter in medschool. Definitely do take classes you want to take.

At least where I attended, most medical students encountered the material before, and that made it possible to digest the inhuman amounts of data so quickly.

 

[nitemagi]

You should aim to be an adult learner. Meaning you then study what you want throughout your life, beyond your training program. You're never "done." I read quite regularly, from journals to other books.

Psychology as a term is a bit nebulous as to the curriculum - developmental, industrial, testing? You may get some of that in undergrad, but it's far different than a graduate psychology training program. So study what you want, and supplement along the way with whatever you feel (or your advisor feels) is missing.

 

[st2205]

I've noticed, with regard to what you're talking about with how you treat patients, that it is really physician dependent. I have seen fantastic FPs, OBGYNs, and even surgeons in how they treat and interact with their patients that made far better psychiatrists than some of the psychiatrists I've observed. I think what you're referring to really boils down to personal factors and those who have them continue to develop them while those who don't don't.

With regard to whether or not psychology as an undergraduate major will help I have doubts. I technically majored in psych, though I substituted a number of neuroscience classes and some other courses from other departments to fulfill a huge part of my psych requirements. I think what you would find beneficial from a psych major could be obtained by taking a few of the classes rather than doing the whole major. In hindsight, the ones I felt the most useful were actually the stats courses and the research methods course. I've been perplexed as to why everywhere seems to require a research methods course for psych but it's never required in any other science discipline. We also had a more unique course in our curriculum that was required and was for psychological testing, which I'd recommend. A lot of the neuro courses were really good (but those weren't taught by the psych department -- the ones that were actually were pretty terrible [not really a universal truth, however]). I took a couple graduate courses, which I don't feel I learned much from. All of the other psych classes, including abnormal psych, personality theory, history of psych and I can't even remember the others -- I don't feel they've been all that useful. Sure we covered a lot of stuff, but never in much detail that I can look back over the years and remember anything about it or that any of the material I hadn't covered in much more detail through the psych clerkship or course in second year.

If I could go back and do it again I'd take a couple of the psych courses, but I'd honestly major in either culinary arts, automechanics or Arabic. I'd love to do Arabic but it's a pretty tough major so I'd probably opt for one of the first two. Of course I only say this in hindsight. At the time I was interested in psychiatry and wanted to get more acquainted with the mental health fields sooner rather than later. In the end I appreciate what I learned most from the stats and research design courses and psychological testing, but I'd prefer doing one of the other majors just for the experience.

 

[nitemagi]

I've noticed, with regard to what you're talking about with how you treat patients, that it is really physician dependent. I have seen fantastic FPs, OBGYNs, and even surgeons in how they treat and interact with their patients that made far better psychiatrists than some of the psychiatrists I've observed. I think what you're referring to really boils down to personal factors and those who have them continue to develop them while those who don't don't.

Having a good bedside manner can go a long way, but is not all that makes a psychiatrist. This is the kind of fallacy that leads people into thinking that they should go into psychiatry simply because they're a "nice person," which I've seen have dangerous risks including poor boundaries, burnout, and boundary violations. A psychiatrist is many things. Being nice is helpful, even necessary in the eyes of some, but not sufficient to being a psychiatrist.

 

[st2205]

Having a good bedside manner can go a long way, but is not all that makes a psychiatrist. This is the kind of fallacy that leads people into thinking that they should go into psychiatry simply because they're a "nice person," which I've seen have dangerous risks including poor boundaries, burnout, and boundary violations. A psychiatrist is many things. Being nice is helpful, even necessary in the eyes of some, but not sufficient to being a psychiatrist.

Sure. I should have clarified that I was specifically speaking toward what the OP thought they'd gain from a psych major. In any case, it was much more than the bedside manner with patients in the instances I'm referring to but more relating to being able to elicit a relevant histor or not getting side-tracked by trying to challenge someone's delusions for a half hour.

 

[whopper]

I think what you would find beneficial from a psych major could be obtained by taking a few of the classes rather than doing the whole major.

Agree though I think our experiences may have been different. I, for example, found several classes useful other than the ones you mentioned.

In hindsight, the ones I felt the most useful were actually the stats courses and the research methods course. I've been perplexed as to why everywhere seems to require a research methods course for psych but it's never required in any other science discipline

I agree that research methods should be a core in any science curriculum, but I believe it's taught more in psychology because there's so many phenomenon that people intuitively attribute to a psychological process without the objective data to truly back it up. Psychology has been argued to not be a science by several in the physical sciences and it's in large part because it's hard to gauge psychological phenomenon. The argument is not valid..of course there's plenty of psychological processes that could be studied, researched, and manipulated in an empirical manner, but it is more difficult than the physical sciences, hence the stronger focus on teaching important core values such as validity and reliability.

 

[st2205]

Agree though I think our experiences may have been different. I, for example, found several classes useful other than the ones you mentioned.



I agree that research methods should be a core in any science curriculum, but I believe it's taught more in psychology because there's so many phenomenon that people intuitively attribute to a psychological process without the objective data to truly back it up. Psychology has been argued to not be a science by several in the physical sciences and it's in large part because it's hard to gauge psychological phenomenon. The argument is not valid..of course there's plenty of psychological processes that could be studied, researched, and manipulated in an empirical manner, but it is more difficult than the physical sciences, hence the stronger focus on teaching important core values such as validity and reliability.

I think all of those principles are still very important for hard sciences. I think the problem is that since they're hard sciences, and therefore 'more refined', that they are therefore immune from errant interpretation and experimentation.

 

[whopper]

Agree. A lot of a curriculum is based on the culture of the older generation's interpretation and decision making processes. Science isn't science just because it can deal with hard core math. It's simply a process of being able to show something empirically, being able to replicate it, and by using that model, your view of the universe grows. Somewhere along the line, people morphed it into something such as what we have in current science 101 classes where students are taught data, but not encouraged to actually practice science--that is the idea of questioning something, then trying to see if others came up with the same results you got.

 

[Faebinder]

I had only 1 course in undergrad in Experimental Psychology and I'm glad I did. Med school helped with the behavioral science courses but residency just didnt do enough. You'll have to self learn a lot of concept or go about not knowing them.

There is no doubt in my mind that Psychology is a science (and I dont have a degree in it). If it wasn't for ethical limitations, we would see some more disturbing findings about the mind.

 

[whopper]

My wife and I have a beautiful daughter, and with one exception she's more than could've ever expected.

She wakes up every 2 hours and the only thing that put her to sleep was breastfeeding. My wife cannot fall asleep at the drop of a hat like I can. If that baby wakes up, my wife wakes up and doesn't fall asleep again for the rest of the night. For 6 months she's only been getting a max of 4 hours a sleep a night for most nights. Mind you she is also working on an Ph.D., and providing DBT for difficult borderline PD clients.

We decided to try the Ferber method to get my daughter to sleep on her own. Our big harrumph with this method was the cortisol onslaught that I figure would happen the first night of it. Why worry? This is something I only learned in psychology, not psychiatry.

Turns out in several animal models, if the infant is left alone, it'll cry or make some type of possible equivalent noise. This is turn causes a mega-release of cortisol. Per the studies done, the cortisol, if released for extended durations, usually over 15 minute is supposed to cause neuronal damage. It also increases the risk of learned helplessness and there are several studies of animals exhibiting behavior fitting a criteria of that phenomenon.. In studies, primate subjects that were left unattended for extended durations, after achieving adulthood had higher rates of infection, lower success in picking up mates, among other markers.

Why anyone would not think this would be beneficial in psychiatry is beyond me. I figure this data should be crucial for pediatricians and general/child psychiatrists. In fact I learned a heck of a lot about cortisol, among several other physiological processes and their impact on mental health only from psychology and not psychiatry. E.g. Oxytocin possibly having some benefits in treating family members with bonding problems, a phenomenon where one spouse usually dies within months of another if they were married for several decades, dopamine release when people experiencing lust,etc. I barely learned anything at all about it in medical school or psychiatry other than the usual medical data such as it's released by the adrenal glands, Addison's disease..blah blah blah.

Has this affected clinical practice? Yes. E.g. if a guy I know is down on the dumps in a relationship, depressed, and has no excessive anxiety, I am more likely to consider Wellbutrin vs. an SSRI. Lack of confidence, same there too since dopamine, not serotonin has been attributed to activities that bolster confidence such as winning a game. Is there actually any hard data proving that Wellbutrin would be the better med in such a situation? To my knowledge no, but my theory IMHO is sound, and it's a situation where there really is no data showing it'd be inferior to an SSRI.

 

[nitemagi]

Whopper, are you proposing the baby or the parent has a massive release of cortisol during a prolonged crying episode?

 

[whopper]

The Ferber method as far as I can tell is basically emulating the child abandonment episode as done in learned helplessness studies. Learned helplessness, however, appeared to only happen in infant animals up until the animals were weaned off of breast milk. From there, the data suggested the effect was not significant. Learned helplessness could still develop anytime in life but in the studies I mentioned, the act of leaving a newborn mammalian to cry it out had devastating effects on it for the rest of it's life.

Now this of course begs the questions, okay, done in animals, would it happen in humans? We don't know but given the studies were done in several mammals, all of which were of species where the mother spent a significant amount of time rearing the child such as dogs and primates, I do believe this data would carry over to humans.

Data also suggests that cortisol release for about under fifteen minutes is actually beneficial. It's when someone is stressed for too long where it causes the problems. This supports the eustress theory, that stress, within controlled amounts is actually beneficial.

Ultimately, my wife and I decided to do the Ferber method (letting the baby cry it out at night so it can sleep on it's own) because the baby reached the point of eating solid food. Was it right decision? We don't know. We tried to hold off as long as possible but my wife's own mental health was being affected, plus I was concerned she might crash her car due to sleep problems.

I'm not advocating Ferber. For all I know this act is potentially creating learned helplessness in infants, but my point is a lot of data that went into my pro/con debate in my own head was all from a psychology education, not psychiatry. These things do have relevance for a clinician. E.g. my kid's pediatrician was wholeheartedly advocating the Ferber method and I bet she didn't know anything of the learned helplessness studies. In fact this debate is raging on in parenting circles with several citing the learned helplessness data against Ferber.

I typically try to cite the sources of data that I present. Unfortunately it's all from my developmental psychobiology class I took years ago, and that book is at my parents house back in NJ.

Now we get to the part where we learn this in residency and medschool. We learn that depression or excessive anxiety such as that in an anxiety disorder causes prolonged release of cortisol and that is damaging, and that is why medications are extremely helpful, not just improving the patient's mood but also in defending their brain against cortisol-induced damage, particularly to the hippocampus.

 

[nitemagi]

The Ferber method as far as I can tell is basically emulating the child abandonment episode as done in learned helplessness studies. Learned helplessness, however, appeared to only happen in infant animals up until the animals were weaned off of breast milk. From there, the data suggested the effect was not significant. Learned helplessness could still develop anytime in life but in the studies I mentioned, the act of leaving a newborn mammalian to cry it out had devastating effects on it for the rest of it's life.

Now this of course begs the questions, okay, done in animals, would it happen in humans? We don't know but given the studies were done in several mammals, all of which were of species where the mother spent a significant amount of time rearing the child such as dogs and primates, I do believe this data would carry over to humans.

Data also suggests that cortisol release for about under fifteen minutes is actually beneficial. It's when someone is stressed for too long where it causes the problems. This supports the eustress theory, that stress, within controlled amounts is actually beneficial.

Ultimately, my wife and I decided to do the Ferber method (letting the baby cry it out at night so it can sleep on it's own) because the baby reached the point of eating solid food. Was it right decision? We don't know. We tried to hold off as long as possible but my wife's own mental health was being affected, plus I was concerned she might crash her car due to sleep problems.

I'm not advocating Ferber. For all I know this act is potentially creating learned helplessness in infants, but my point is a lot of data that went into my pro/con debate in my own head was all from a psychology education, not psychiatry. These things do have relevance for a clinician. E.g. my kid's pediatrician was wholeheartedly advocating the Ferber method and I bet she didn't know anything of the learned helplessness studies. In fact this debate is raging on in parenting circles with several citing the learned helplessness data against Ferber.

I typically try to cite the sources of data that I present. Unfortunately it's all from my developmental psychobiology class I took years ago, and that book is at my parents house back in NJ.

Now we get to the part where we learn this in residency and medschool. We learn that depression or excessive anxiety such as that in an anxiety disorder causes prolonged release of cortisol and that is damaging, and that is why medications are extremely helpful, not just improving the patient's mood but also in defending their brain against cortisol-induced damage, particularly to the hippocampus.

I would counter the issue of learned helplessness with the concepts of encouraging self-soothing and with the zone of proximal development. If a parent steps in every time a child suffers even a little bit, then there's no room to develop skills for independence.

I would further add in the biggest risk parents fear is poor attachment, to which I'd point you to the "Strange Situation" test in attachment theory. http://www.personalityresearch.org/attachment/strange.html
I'd be curious to see research looking at the ferber approach and attachment outcomes.

I think leaving your child a little longer to cry during the night isn't abandonment. It's not like waiting through the night is the same as child neglect. Though for an anxious parent I could imagine it feeling that way. If they're not looking like this, you're probably ok.

 

[PETRAN]

This

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/abn/120/3/

This

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-behavior-therapy-and-experimental-psychiatry/

And This

http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/current


Are some good psychology-related stuff (among many others) that could inform clinical practice. So yeah, taking classes in abnormal, social, developmental psychology, psychometrics/methodology, cognitive neuropsychology and biopsychology/behavioral neuroscience could be very useful IMO. If not a major, a minor in psych could be helpful, especially if you are also into academics/research. In the end of the day, it may not change your psychiatric interventions at all if you end-up doing only drug consultations, but it would still greatly assist you in conceptualizing a case, "see things" other people would miss and collaborating in a more efficient way with other mental-health professionals (e.g. with a clinical psychologist).



p.s. The British MRCPsych (Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists) Curricullum (one must study during the first three years of psychiatry residency and pass 4 exams or something) has a lot of basic and applied Psychology in it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRCPsych



Maybe the could do something similar with the US system e.g. instead of USMLE step 3 you could take a "step-1 psychiatry exam" e.g. in the end of the first or second year of residnecy (with the board one being the step-2)

 

[whopper]

Appreciate the input. My own theory is that letting the baby cry it out on it's own is likely detrimental if done too early based on the data I mentioned, but also detrimental if done too late based on what you mentioned.

I had to testify on a case where a woman was breastfeeding her kid that was....five years old. The actual breastfeeding wasn't the issue, but idea came to mind that doing it this long--would this lead to problems? E.g. dependent PD issues?

Getting back on topic, and I don't mind if anyone steals this idea, though if you do please include me if you work on this....

I was thinking of writing a two book series. I had a buddy in residency who was in college and determined to be a psychologist and indulged him with this idea but I lost contact with him.

Psychology for Psychiatrists
Psychiatry for Psychologists

Both books would have differing but complementary covers. Get some psychology colleagues on board, the one book containing things clinically helpful for the one profession but usually only taught in the other, and the other book the same for the other profession.

 

[billypilgrim37]

I wish I had every second of my psychology minor back. I got dumber and dumber every minute I spent in those classes. But they were really easy and basically free As, and the girls in those classes were MUCH prettier than the girls in my biology and english classes. I was about two classes away from getting the psych major (that would have been my third--I had enough credits and the requirements to graduate with a biology degree at the end of my sophomore year, but didn't want to risk it screwing up my scholarships if I had technically graduated). I kept a running page in the back of my notebook in my biological psychology class. My favorite was how the professor spent a whole week talking about "cell walls" instead of cell membranes. So clueless. His research involved poking pigeons. Or at least it had been. There weren't a lot of people in our psychology department actually getting their grants renewed.

Of course, my undergraduate institution was an athletically gifted BCS institution below the Mason-Dixon line (I just got a jar of moonshine for xmas from my mother-in-law), so my psychology experience might not match many of yours.

 

[PETRAN]

I wish I had every second of my psychology minor back. I got dumber and dumber every minute I spent in those classes. But they were really easy and basically free As, and the girls in those classes were MUCH prettier than the girls in my biology and english classes. I was about two classes away from getting the psych major (that would have been my third--I had enough credits and the requirements to graduate with a biology degree at the end of my sophomore year, but didn't want to risk it screwing up my scholarships if I had technically graduated). I kept a running page in the back of my notebook in my biological psychology class. My favorite was how the professor spent a whole week talking about "cell walls" instead of cell membranes. So clueless. His research involved poking pigeons. Or at least it had been. There weren't a lot of people in our psychology department actually getting their grants renewed.

Of course, my undergraduate institution was an athletically gifted BCS institution below the Mason-Dixon line (I just got a jar of moonshine for xmas from my mother-in-law), so my psychology experience might not match many of yours.

Well, plants (and some fungi and bacteria?) have "cell walls" lol. Maybe the professor was talking about plant biopsychology



Truth be told, a lot of psychology is easy. I personally think that the more cognitive/experimental psycholgy (as well as methodology/psychometrics) is the more "difficult" one due to the abstract nature of the theoretical models (e.g. psychologicam models of reasoning and decision making, language perception and production, visual perception, deductive inference, mental representations, executive functions, "mentalizing" and theory of mind etc. a lot of them are also modelled computationally, neural networks or in Bayesian way etc.) and the sometimes-very complicated performance/reaction-time experiments done to disprove/verify/develop these models. I think it greatly develops one's critical thinking skills and i rank them together with the harder sciences, somehow resembling a type of "mental physics" (which has yet to completely develop) or a "humanistic computer science of the mind" rather than current biology.




A lot of psychology though is more "experimental" today, but it is mostly the "academic/research" type-of-psychology rather than the more applied one. There was always a dichotomy between the psychotherapy/intervention-type-more-applied psychology which has its origins in Freud and Psychoanalysis and the more "psychonomic" type experimental stuff which was derived from German experimentalists e.g. Helmholtz, Wundt and Titchener. These two paradigms have moved closer during the later decades (e.g. with the more "Empirical" psychological interventions and therapies like CBT, DBT etc. and the experimental psychologists getting out of the laboratory and doing field research, more "ecologically-valid" stimuli and paradigms or with patients etc.) but a gap still exists for some reason. It is like an inherent difficulty integrating the subjective with the objective. Both basic and applied can help a lot in clinical practice IMO (both a psychiatrist and clinical psychologist)

 

[whopper]

As, and the girls in those classes were MUCH prettier than the girls in my biology and english classes

I noticed that too.

In fact I noticed that when I went to medschool, there were hardly any cuties.

I also remember a few psychology classes that were heavily biologically oriented where the professor was clueless to the biology. I remember actually getting a few questions wrong that I felt were actually right due to the prof's cluelessness. Starting in the 90s, psychology became much more heavily biologically oriented, and the older generation psychologists had to learn it without having a real biology background. And of course, since they were already faculty, no one actually had the power to make sure they actually knew their stuff and they could get away with it.

Although I also did have some profs that actually knew more than M.D.s. There was one guy for example that did a 400 level psychopharm course that knew more than most psychiatrists I've known. The guy did research for pharm companies as the brunt of his work for the university. The developmental psychobiology course I took and the physiological psych courses were done by guys that were solid on their biology. These were all 300 or higher level courses.

 

[NoNoNoNo]

Even from medical school, it's just so...medical. People learn physiology and anatomy and all of that stemming from the relative dictum, "Learn the normal before the abnormal." We don't learn normal psychology, though, which is unfortunate in a career of treating "the abnormal."

But, overall, take classes you're interested in. And if some of those end up as psychology or cognitive science or neuroscience or literature, so be it.

 

[billypilgrim37]

These were all 300 or higher level courses.

Cell wall pigeon guy was totally teaching a 300 level class!

I'm not being entirely fair, the classes were enjoyable. But they served the same function in my life as coming home and watching reruns of the Simpsons. Something fun that didn't require much effort and provided a modicum of information.

 

[st2205]

Cell wall pigeon guy was totally teaching a 300 level class!

I'm not being entirely fair, the classes were enjoyable. But they served the same function in my life as coming home and watching reruns of the Simpsons. Something fun that didn't require much effort and provided a modicum of information.

This pretty much sums up my experience with the few exceptions noted above.

A lot of times I hear abnormal psych as a good course that can cover stuff you won't get in residency. I've never understood this. Many places that have psychiatrists in the psych department have them teach abnormal psych. If anything, I feel this is the class that's best taught by a psychiatrist due to needing broad exposure to psychiatric diagnoses, which is what abnormal psych is.

Anyway, the neuro courses taught by psych I found to be weak because of the background of those teaching, with one exception (but despite being in the psych dept he was actually a physiologist).

 

[Therapist4Chnge]

Anyway, the neuro courses taught by psych I found to be weak because of the background of those teaching, with one exception (but despite being in the psych dept he was actually a physiologist).

I didn't know psych depts. offered neuro classes at the undergrad level, no sense re-inventing the wheel when you have neuroanatomists and similar in other departments who can speak to the nitty-gritty of the science.

 

[lostnconfused]

test

 

[lostnconfused]

nevermind

 

[maomaonow]

Wow thank you everyone for all the input! Hearing from you guys was incredibly helpful. I have decided to go ahead and major in psychology. Unfortunately, since I just started pre-med as a sophomore, I don't have much time to explore my options in other majors. If I do decide on a different path once I get into med school, then at least I had a chance to get a glimpse of the field as an undergrad.

Once again, thank you so much!!!