<p>As medical specialties go, psychiatry is not one of the better-compensated ones. I am not sure you should go into it for the money.</p>
<p>You can major in anything at all, but you must complete the pre-medical requirements. These include biology, chemistry (organic and inorganic) and physics, so many students find it convenient to have a major where those courses count toward major requirements. Certainly you should take both introductory psychology and abnormal psychology, and probably something about neuroscience and the function of the brain. However, there are probably quite a number of courses in the psychology department that aren’t particularly applicable to the work of a psychiatrist.</p>
<p>There is no such thing as a “psychiatry med school program.” You would apply to med school, the same as if you intended to become an orthopedic surgeon or a radiologist, and you’ll take all the same courses. Medical school is, of course, quite competitive for admissions so you’ll want to do as well as possible in college, and work with the pre-med advisors to find out what else you should be doing to create a competitive application to medical school.</p>
<p>In medical school, you will complete the required curriculum that prepares you to function as a medical doctor. Your school may offer some elective time and you can do some extra rotations in psychiatry then, if you’re still interested in psychiatry by then and haven’t decided to do something else instead.</p>
<p>In your fourth year of medical school you will apply to psychiatry residency programs. Psychiatry residency programs are not particularly competitive. Some top programs are, but it’s not hard to get a psych residency somewhere.</p>
<p>In your psych residency, you will do a minimum of four months and as much as 12 months of general internal medicine during your internship year (the first year). Programs vary. You also have to get at least two months of neurology. The rest of your four year program will be psychiatry.</p>
<p>The work of a psychiatrist depends very much on your practice setting. If you work in an academic medical center, you’d probably have months when you were responsible for taking care of patients on the inpatient unit (with a resident physician under your supervision), teaching responsibilities, and patients of your own you would see for outpatient visits. If you work in a community mental health clinic, you would probably see many patients every day for brief medication management visits (their psychotherapy would be provided by a non-physician professional), and a few patients a day for more extensive intake/diagnostic interviews to determine the best course of treatment. If anyone had a medical or psychiatric emergency, you’d manage that, including arranging for hospitalization, etc. If you had your own outpatient practice, you would determine the mix of how you practiced–medication management visits, psychotherapy visits, evaluations and referrals, etc.</p>
<p>Probably the growth in this field would be in geriatric psychiatry–the care of the elderly patient. Expertise in evaluation and management of dementia would be important.</p>
<p>(P.S. I am a psychiatrist and I majored in psychology.)</p>