Part 1 – Medicine itself
In Australia, generally your doctor is the first person you will meet when you are experiencing mild to moderate mental health problems. You will go to them and explain what you are experiencing and they should ask you some questions about it. Shortly afterwards you will most likely be prescribed some medication and or be given a referral to a counsellor. What the doctor has done here is hear a list of symptoms, done an assessment (the questions and your answers) and then made a judgement about your situation and implemented a treatment. Generally the treatment (medication and or counselling) will have a return to the doctor in x amount of time for follow up. The counsellor will also be sending reports to the doctor, just like if you went and had an X-ray for a suspected fracture – the doctor gets a report about that too. If you have a more severe experience with mental ill health you might go straight to the hospital emergency department (ED) and see either a doctor there or a psychiatrist. The doctor will follow the same procedure outlined above while the psychiatrist will be doing a longer version because it has been deemed that your situation is more complex than a standard general practitioner can deal with. GP’s are well versed at many things, but they are not specialists – they are generalists in medical care. The psychiatrist will then generally give you a diagnosis, a script for medication, refer you to counselling and like the doctor, check in on you every now and then. Psychiatric medication has a nasty stigma attached to it. Some of the reasons are empty and some have some interesting history. Good medical practices started a mere hundred and fifty years ago, which is practically modern history so far as our scientific knowledge is concerned. Good psychiatric practices slowly followed. Increases in our scientific understanding of bacteria, X-Rays and scientific method accelerated our medical knowledge to the point where a wound isn’t likely to kill you, we know that smoking cigarettes is bad for you and we are having this stupid debate about whether to vaccine or not (do it) after vaccines have pretty much eradicated nasty diseases such as polio, almost measles and some other stuff that should just die. Psychiatric medicine is still in its early stages and even only a few decades ago we had some pretty horrific problems with experimental drugs.

By © Nevit Dilmen, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17373724