Psychology

DeskPotato
Sun, 12 Feb 2012 13:02:00 +0000

I am a psychiatrist who majored in psychology as an undergrad. I actually did not do my pre-med classes until after graduation, but that’s neither here nor there.

I have read that there may be changes coming to the course requirements for medical school applicants, but, at present, they include the courses you mentioned. Each of those is a year-long course, but obviously, it’s not hard to fit them into your life while majoring in something else.

The AMCAS website has a lot of information about requirements. You might want to check that out.

Within a psychology major, you can emphasize a lot of different aspects of psychology. Courses in behavioral psychology can be helpful, as well as courses that are more biological and help you with a grounding in how the brain works (sometimes called neuroscience or neuropsychology). A course on abnormal psychology serves as, more or less, an overview of mental illness, and can be very helpful to anyone looking to work in the mental health field. Psychology courses also introduce you to major thinkers whose work influenced psychiatric practice before the modern era of psychopharmacology, such as Freud, Adler, Piaget, Erikson.

In medical school, there was some rudimentary review of concepts like classical and operant conditioning, and concepts of human development. However, I felt that my undergrad work in psychology gave me a much better grounding than I would have had with just the medical school courses alone. Of course, medical schools differ in how much they emphasize psychiatry and how well and thoroughly they teach it.

Psychiatry residencies are “on-the-job-training,” where you are taking care of psychiatric patients under the supervision of faculty members. But psychiatry is a little special. If you are learning to be a radiologist, you and the attending can look at the same x-rays and you can check whether you are seeing what the attending is seeing. If you are learning to be an internist, you and the attending can both listen to the patient’s heart and you can see whether or not you hear the murmur the attending is hearing. In psychiatry, you interact with the patient alone most of the time and there isn’t the option for someone to see what you saw and for you to bounce your response off of someone else before you give it. So the more you have learned, read, and thought about beforehand, the better, IMO.