Oops, sorry. My ignorance is showing. Anything you think is applicable is fine by me.
No probs, lots of psychiatrists do do psychotherapy as a special interest.
Day-to-day bread-and-butter psychiatry does include outcome measures - or, at least, a built-in system of reviewing progress (not least because there's always pressure on the services, and it's important to keep reviewing the need for psychiatric input itself). In most cases, this means three to six monthly meetings of everyone involved in the treatment (pshrink, patient, relatives, friends, CPN, social worker, psychologist, advocate, anyone the patient wants along) where we review things like psychological well-being, physical health, social functioning, etc., etc. In some cases, this includes standardised questionnaires.
With some chronically ill people (long-term schizophrenic folk, for example), the process is open-ended. With others, there's a stated aim at the outset eg. 'eliminate x troubling symptom', with periodic review of how we're doing in achieving that aim. |
