Psychiatry: the Last Frontier

Our cohort is in the first week of our last specialist clinical placement, and there is a certain feeling of conclusion in the air. For the vast majority of our group, this is the last medical rotation we will do at Warwick Medical School. It’s hard to believe that we’re so close to being done (well, there’s just that small matter of final exams…), but at the same time it feels like we’ve been learning for a very long time (actually, we have!) and so the fact that the end is in sight is a bit of a relief. We’re very much looking forward to progressing onto the next phase of our lives and careers.

My clinical partner and I have Psychiatry as our last rotation, and it’s proving to be very interesting and eye-opening. This is a branch of medicine about which I know very little, and so seeing the different presentations and the sheer variety on offer is really interesting. It’s also the one rotation that’s probably got the least to do with any other speciality, and so we really have to concentrate if we want to follow everything. Back in Phase II, we had a week’s exposure to the psychiatry speciality via a placement on a secure ward: it was interesting, but that placement was slightly more intense as it was psychiatric intensive care, whereas our current placement is almost wholly community-based. In any event, we’re seeing loads of very interesting presentations and the staff we work with are all very supportive and friendly, and they want to make sure that we learn as much as we can.

We’ve had lectures at many points in our medical-school career about the various types of psychiatric presentations, and like most of medicine, most of them are little more than words on a page until we see them in the flesh. However, up till now we have tended not to focus on a patient’s psychiatric co-morbidities if he or she is on a regular medical ward with a more pressing physical problem. For that reason, we haven’t usually been focusing on many psychiatric presentations until now, when it is the specific focus of our block. That’s why this block is helping us to see lots of new and exciting cases of conditions we’ve read about – it’s been a long time since a new branch of medicine was opened up to us like this!

We’re only a few days into it, but so far we have seen patients with schizophrenia, emotionally unstable personality disorder, severe depression and many other conditions that we’ve only read about up to now. It’s really a different flavour of medicine entirely. There is a lot of pharmacology (and with this come LOADS of contraindications and side-effects to learn), a lot of psychological therapies (mainly CBT, or cognitive behavioural therapy, typically administered by psychologists) and plenty of other therapies that we don’t see much of outside of psychiatry. I’m really excited by the potential, and I’m sure this block will live up to the excitement.

Joshua Galvin : 10 Nov 2017 09:09 |  Tags: John Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem