Adolescent Psychology?

Bigredmed
Thu, 07 May 2009 00:46:18 +0000

Realize also that depending on your exact career goals, becoming a child/adolescent psychiatrist or specialist in adolescent medicine should be considered. However these options would require you to go to medical school.

To become a child psychiatrist, there are a couple of options, but all begin with earning an MD or DO degree which is 4 years. After that, you can do a number of things

1. complete a 4 year general psychiatry residency then follow it with a 2 year Child/Adolescent fellowship program

2. try a 5 year “triple board” residency program in which you complete 2 years of a pediatrics residency, 18 months of a general psychiatry residency and 18 months of a child/adolescent psych fellowship, that when completed would allow you to become board certified in all three specialties.

There are 2 other options that are less psychiatry based, more medical in nature but still offer a lot of opportunity to help children and teens who are having problems.

3) Complete a 3 year general pediatrics or internal medicine (or 4 year combined medicine/pediatrics) residency program then finish a 3 year adolescent medicine fellowship. You’d primarily be focused on the “medicine” portion of care (and by this I mean, you wouldn’t be focused exclusively on just psych issues) but since the physical health of teenagers is so intertwined with their mental health, adolescent physicians are VERY good at helping their patients through problems at school, work, home and with friends.

4) There is a new program (I’m having trouble finding the link at the moment) which is aimed at training general pediatricians to be better and more comfortable with psychiatric conditions in childhood. I believe it’s two years, and would follow general pediatrics residency with the idea being you’d still be a community pediatrician, but better equipped to diagnose and treat the variety of problems kids experience.

The biggest difference in these options compared to being a school/child psychologist is the prescription aspect. You have to have an MD or DO to prescribe medications. The difference between options 1 and 2 as compared to 3&4 is that the psychiatrists receive training in things like psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, with less emphasis on other aspects of illness (though the triple boarders do have the two years of general peds). It may not seem like much, but it does make a difference - when I was on my psych rotation during the third year of medical school, I had a schizophrenic patient show one of the psych residents (a doctor training to be a psychiatrist) a rash they had, to which the psych resident said “you should really see a doctor about that”.

This is probably more information and more choices than you thought existed!