Psychiatrist, psychotherapist, psychologist - who's what?

"So, what do you do?"

Most of the times when I answer "I'm a Psychotherapist" to that question, I get a puzzled look and the next question is "what is that?" or "what's the difference between what you do and a psychiatrist or a psychologist?".

So I thought I'd write a brief post to explain the differences.

Psychiatrists are medical doctors, who specialise in mental illnesses. Surprisingly, that covers a lot of conditions that the layman may not think of as mental illnesses, such as eating disorders, addictions, depression as well as the more classic ones such as schizophrenia, bipolar etc. Psychiatrists are the only mental health professionals who can prescribe drugs, and being doctors, this is often their first and sometimes their only port of call.

Psychology on the other hand is the study of the human mind in all of its applications, which is why you can find psychologists in professions as diverse as human Resources, marketing or advertising - they study how humans "tick". Clinical psychologists are not medical doctors, but have to do a specialisation which makes them part of the medical model, and hence some of their sessions can be covered by Medicare. Their main tool is cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), which is about changing your thoughts and behaviours in order to change your feelings.

Psychotherapy by contrast is the study of the human mind in its therapeutic applications. It is a "helping profession" only. The tools at our disposal are very varied, you can find people working in psychodynamic, Gestalt or existential therapy, following Carl Rogers' Humanistic approach, Victor Frankl's idea of freedom to choose, Murray Bowen's Family systems theory, Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalysis or Carl Jung, and for some of us, the "eclectic" therapists, many of the above.

In my practice I rarely decide which modality I will use, it happens organically and I will often only realise later on that "oh, I've used CBT with this client today" or "I've worked existentially with that client". I like having a full tool-box, because the risk of only having a hammer is to be only able to see the whole world as a nail...

So while I can't prescribe you drugs, and won't give you advice or tell you how to think or what to do, what I can do is offer you is a safe space to confide yourself and help you work out your own personal way to heal yourself.

That is what I do.