Anonymous asked:

What are the median psychiatrists' scores on the depression and anxiety scales? How many of them struggle with some kind of mental disorder and are their recovery rates any better than in the average population?

I don’t know.

There’s a stereotype that psychotherapists and counselors and such are pretty likely to have mental illnesses. My impression is that this is less true of psychiatrists - a lot of them went into medical school without a specialization, and chose psychiatry for kind of random reasons like having a good teacher in the field, so it’s not like these are people who have been interested in mental health forever. The general doctor population is really REALLY normal compared to the tech / academic population I meet - the only exceptions are various diseases of high stress and high achievement (especially alcoholism).

This is especially true now, when (possible stereotype here, but borne of experience) a lot of the new psychiatrists are first- and second- generation immigrants from really high-achieving families, who compete so hard with all the other high-achieving immigrants for the doctor jobs that some of them end up in psychiatry. This isn’t a very mentally ill group, and a lot of the countries these people come from believe in much brighter lines between “mentally ill” and “normal” than our culture does.

I remember mentioning to some of these people that I have mild OCD; a couple of them thought I was joking, the rest were really shocked.

I think you get way more illness in the therapists, counselors, etc, especially the ones that are kind of low-status and don’t require a lot of training. Drug counseling is probably majority former-addict, often by design since they (probably correctly) believe former addicts will know more and be better able to relate. This becomes less likely as you go up to MD addictionologists, though the MD addictionologist at my hospital was very open about having been a former addict.

(I was never sure how seriously to take him - he claimed that once when he was a college student he got busted for smoking pot, and his lawyer said to tell the judge he was pre-med because judges thought pre-med kids were responsible and wanted to give them second chances. He says he told the judge that, the judge said he was going to monitor his pre-med progress, and he had no choice other than to actually become pre-med and go to medical school, which is why he was a doctor today. He had lots of stories like that.)

As for recovery rates - the only statistic I know here is that doctors’ recovery rates from alcoholism are light-years beyond the general population’s. There are special programs for alcoholic doctors that involve constant monitoring to see if their license should be suspended, and everyone always holds up these programs as apparently really good, but the reality is that it’s probably just selection bias and doctors have way more social / financial / genetic resources to use than average.