Let us understand what a psychiatrist is there to help you do:
Generally, there are 3 potential roles that psychiatrists can have in their relationship with a patient.
1) Diagnose the patient to help the patient to understand what the problem is and therefore to have a method of treatment based on the diagnosis. The issues here are many in that there are too many overlapping diagnoses such as those with bipolar 1 which included psychotic features being confused with schizophrenia which are two totally different illnesses as an example. Another would be the confusion of one with Borderline Personality Disorder with Bipolar because of the mood dysregulation, however, once again there are many differences between the two which would make the differences obvious to one who is skilled in diagnostics, but sadly this is not the case given the many clients I have seen who have been misdiagnosed usually with illnesses they never had.
2) Medication Evaluation and Medication Monitoring to make sure that the medications that one is placed on are doing the job because over time medications can become ineffective. Or, one can be overmedicated which happens in too many cases from my experience where one is experiencing many negative side-effects which can disturb one’s quality of life or worse lead to toxicity because of the damage these harsh drugs can do over time to the patient’s body.
3) Therapy which is really the best because the same person who is monitoring your medication is also helping one to understand how to better interact first with themselves such as building up confidence and self-love and then with others by learning healthier ways to communicate their needs and wants. However, this also can become difficult because sometimes the psychiatrist will tell the patient things that the patient does not want to acknowledge which need to be acknowledged to be able to grow such as how certain defense mechanisms are not helping them and instead harming them in their interactions with others. Other times while giving therapy a psychiatrists may tell a patient what they will never be able to accomplish because of the diagnosis given. However, this is NOT a viable thing to be stated because from my personal experience as well as those of many of my clients who have been able to clear the root causes of their problems have been able to go on to do incredible things with their lives. The other real problem that many in therapy run into is being told what they think and what they feel as if the therapist has a way to enter their patient’s mind to know these things. Obviously, they have no way of knowing either of these things so it would be best if they asked if they may be thinking or feeling these things if the therapist believes these may be on the patient’s mind.
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