Difference Between Therapist and Psychiatrist?
Question by nick: Difference between therapist and psychiatrist?
I’m writing a short story and I need to know the difference between a therapist and a psychiatrist. Which one would deal with a patient that believes he is hearing voices and a patient that has agoraphobia (fear to leave your house)?
Best answer:
Answer by S
When you ask “which one”, you’re writing as though they have to be two separate people, but they don’t: a therapist is simply anyone who provides therapy, so a therapist can be a psychiatrist. Having said that, if you’re talking about long-term therapy involving talking (basically some form of “psychotherapy” or “counselling”), a psychiatrist may be somewhat less likely to be involved in this. That’s because a psychiatrist can (as another answer pointed out) prescribe medication: a psychiatrist is a fully qualified medical doctor who has then also undertaken psychiatric training. Some of that psychiatric training may involve psychotherapy without drugs, but with psychiatrists being the only psychotherapists who can prescribe drugs, they tend to do a lot of that: they often work in mental hospitals with patients that most counsellors don’t know how to cope with, and give these patients drugs to control their behavior.
“Hearing voices” is a classic symptom of “schizophrenia”, which is basically psychological jargon for “nuts” (it’s the diagnosis they tend to give people when they can’t make any other sense out of their behavior), and as such it’s one of the most likely diagnoses, by far, to be treated with drugs. Most people diagnosed with schizophrenia are prescribed some kind of medication, so if your patient is hearing voices, she or he may well be seeing a psychiatrist. On the other hand, agoraphobia is the kind of condition that’s more likely to be treated by psychotherapy that doesn’t involve drugs (maybe some kind of cognitive behavioral therapy involving gradual desensitization, getting the client comfortable with progressively more threatening situations…or maybe some kind of “depth psychology” or psychoanalytic counselling, trying to arrive at an understanding of what the client is “really” afraid of, and how to address that underlying issue), so for that condition your patient is unlikely to be seeing a psychiatrist. She or he is more likely to be seeing a psychologist or a counsellor.
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