Blog #13: Answer 1

 EQ: What are the best ways to becoming a successful psychiatrist?


1) What is answer 1 to your EQ? Be specific in your answer and write it like a thesis statement.


Always conduct your business with a sense of empathy, humbleness, and humility–professionally and personally.


2) What possible evidence do you have to support this answer?


-Through my interviews, I  was able to come much closer to answering my EQ. I learned from my interview with Dr. Owen K Tsuchiya that “It’s [psychiatry] uniquely personal and yet detached; it’s a curious balance." My service learning mentor chose the field of psychiatry because it is such a humanistic and personal sub-specialty of medicine. He explained to me that in order to succeed in psychiatry, you can't treat your patient from a strictly scientific point of view; you must be empathetic to truly understand a mental illness.


-Through my endeavors in my service learning and research, I took great strides towards answering my EQ. I learned that a successful psychiatrist should have awareness that a psychiatric diagnosis is the most unique way of diagnosis because it is so subjective -- there is no definitive diagnostic blood or imaging (CT scan, MRI, etc) test that can confirm a diagnosis.  Knowing this, a psychiatrist should always know that no matter how confident they are of their initial diagnosis of a patient, the diagnosis will always be provisional and subject to change. You must also be able to consider the fact that many common treatment don’t really suit a particular patient.

Personal humility, I have learned, is practiced when a psychiatrist approaches patient with the constant awareness that the patient, even in his worst stage of mental illness, is an equal to him as a human being. "That but for an accident of birth in a family with different genetic risks, and different social, economic or cultural background, he could very well be suffering from any of the illnesses that afflict his patients."

3. What source(s) did you find this evidence and/or answer?

Service learning at Kaiser LAMC and with Psychiatrist Owen Tsuchiya, and interviews with Dr. Shahin and Dr. Tsuchiya.