An underwhelming first week of psychiatry...

This is, technically speaking, the end of the first week of my psychiatry rotation, but I've only spent about six hours actually seeing patients, and all of that has been basically watching the doctor talk to patients. Granted, my actual preceptor is on vacation this week so we're only seeing the covering physician doing his rounds at an inpatient facility, so I'm sure it'll improve once he's back at the end of next week, but as of right now I'm not impressed.

Plus, the drive to get to this rotation is ridiculous. It takes about an hour and 15 minutes to get to the site...it does get pretty as you get into the suburbs, but it gets old. Luckily (I guess), I only had to make the drive three days this week!

The inpatient facility we go to (I say 'we' because one of my classmates is also at the site!) is really more of a holding facility, a sort of in-between for people that can't stay in the ER but either can't find a bed in a long-term inpatient facility or will be cleared to go home after just a few days of observation. This includes a lot of suicide attempts and people who would like to go to rehab for various addictions but can't find a place with an open bed. Those two groups probably comprise 95% of the patient's I've seen so far, and the other few are people from group homes who were violent and got involuntarily committed from their other institution.

As you can imagine, most of the stories you hear from these patients are just awful. It's not exactly an uplifting rotation. I'm hoping that when the actual preceptor gets back from vacation and we get to see some outpatient stuff that it gets a little better. At least in an outpatient setting you can see garden-variety anxiety and depression that is (hopefully) getting better with medication. I have seen some interesting things so far, though...including a (very paranoid) schizophrenic, and a person with borderline personality disorder. So that was interesting to see!

I'm really hoping that this rotation picks up next week. It might take until the week after to get really interesting, though, since the main preceptor doesn't get back until Thursday. But I'll be sure to post if something interesting does come up!