Psychiatry

We just had one of those "Intro to X" lectures, where X is whatever we happen to be studying at the moment. Sometimes these lectures are really useful because the lecturer somehow manages to sum up everything useful about the whole discipline into a one hour presentation. That's what the Intro to the Gastrointestinal Tract (a.k.a. GIT) was like - as it turns out, basically all GIT consists of is asking people how often they go to the toilet. (NB: I may be seriously mistaken on this. Fingers crossed for exam results!)

However, this lecture was not like that. This lecture, "Intro to Psychiatry", was just lots of lists of the sorts of things that we'll be looking at at some later date, without actually conveying any useful information to us. As such, I let my mind wander through distant golden fields for most of the hour.

I was brought back to reality though by a fascinating slide which was comparing public vs private psychiatric practice. It consisted of these two lists:

Public

• Low income
• Lower functioning
• Cannabis and amphetamine
• Low prevalence disorders

Private

• High income
• Higher functioning
• Alcohol
• High prevalence disorders

The startling thing is that initially I was unsure whether the slide was referring to the patients or the doctors.

Actually, I'm still not 100% certain...