Psychotherapy London

2 Responses to “FORENSIC PSYCHIATRIST…Do you know how much they earn??”

1. Mr. Goodhi © said:
   

   June 22nd, 2010 at 4:42 am

   $50,000 a year.

2. K said:
   

   June 22nd, 2010 at 4:42 am

   A lot.. LOL Read below. Good luck!

   This is a question frequently asked by young people considering becoming a psychiatrist versus a psychologist - or whether or not to even go into the "mental health care" area. In essence, they want to know if it will be "worth it" to invest that many years of effort and delayed gratification into a possible career of psychiatry or psychology. Will it "pay off" in the end?

   That’s a very reasonable question to try to find the answer to. The answer to it is - like so much else in life - "that all depends." It depends on how entrepreneurial you are, how comfortable (or uncomfortable!) you are with working inside a managed care management plan, where you want to practice, what you want to practice (see above), and how much you want to practice. I would estimate that salaries in psychiatry range from $50,000 up to $200 - $300,000. Salaries and "reimbursement rates" tend to be lower in big cities and highly desired locations (San Francisco, Boston, New York, etc.) than out in the boonies or the frozen plains of South Dakota.

   Lest you look at the top dollar number above and say, "I knew it all along. Those greedy doctors!" let me hastily add that while it is theoretically possible to make that much - and some people do - the way that it is done is do run people through practices like a machine assembly line, or do to "wave therapy" in the hospital. That’s where the physician appears in the door, "waves" to the patient, and then documents a visit. That’s not the way I practice. It is also possible - in almost any professional field of endeavor - to make a lot of money if you sacrifice everything else for it: family, friends, hobbies, a balanced lifestyle, and so forth. And that’s not even mentioning "patient satisfaction."

   Permit me to wax philosophical for a moment. (Hey, if you weren’t interested, you wouldn’t be reading this anyway, right?!) Perhaps the first "casualty" of a high dollar, high volume, low patient contact time style of practice is PATIENT SATISFACTION. I can’t conceive of practicing in this way: making a lot of money but hating what you do. You couldn’t possibly love what you do or you would be doing it well. And you can’t do it well if you don’t get to know your patient. And you can’t get to know your patient if you don’t spend time with them. And there’s a theoretical limit to how much you can charge per hour. So there are going to be built-in limits to how much you can make if you "do it right." I believe that the happiest, best-adjusted, and highest-quality, patient-focused psychiatrists I know exist in that optimum balanced state where, for them, they have found just the right balance between time devoted to their practice versus their personal lives, and the amount of time spent with the patient which permits "obtaining the data base" and building a good solid therapeutic relationship with the patient. Real and meaningful change for the patient can thus take place in this optimized style of practice versus merely wasting time, shooting the breeze, and coddling the patient

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