My journey to become A Psychatrist

By Williard Shanken

Why was I drawn to become a psychiatrist?

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to become a doctor. Also, from an early age, two prominent features of my personality emerged: I experienced a great deal of inner satisfaction when I listened to my family and friends and was able to help them. Also, I was curious about what motivated people’s behavior. As a youngster, I would wonder: "Why did this person or that person express those feelings?" or "Why did that individual behave that way?"

In high school, I became fascinated with hypnosis and I read numerous books on this topic. As a senior in high school, I wrote a paper, “The Psychological Effects of Facial Plastic Surgery.“ I took a college course entitled, The Abnormal Personality. This course explored how people’s problems were often the result of early life experiences and left a mark on an individual’s unconscious mind. That course jogged me into the realization that my path was set to not only be a physician but to pursue the specialty of psychiatry.

In my psychiatric training. most of my teachers were psychoanalysts and their approach to understanding people's problems continued to strike a chord of validity within me. Thus, after completing my training as a psychiatrist, I then pursued further study in both Child and Adult Psychoanalysis.

Presently, I am on the faculty of the Philadelphia Center for Psychoanalysis. Teaching is a way to continue to learn as well as to help others.

Initially, when I pursued private practice, I rarely used medication. My professional belief was that most problems could be handled with psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, not with medicine. Managed care entered the scene with the emphasis on short treatment and medication management. This was a marked difference from the way I had practiced and I was not sure it made clinical sense. I educated myself in depth about psychopharmacology, and over time, and with the advent of newer medications with less side-effects, I have found medication to be useful in conjunction with psychotherapy.

I try to understand the person who is trusting me with his or her pain and struggles. Each individual is unique and my approach is, in turn, unique to each individual. On the one hand, I am happy when I can recommend solely talk therapy because it offers my patient an opportunity for self-enlightenment as well as symptom relief; but I am also aware there are many problems that require medication coupled with psychotherapeutic intervention. I am a medication minimalist: To relieve an individual’s distress, I use as few medicines as is feasible with the lowest possible doses.

I continue to enjoy helping people. As my patient and I engage in talk therapy, I marvel at how the human spirit has the capacity to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Therefore, in addition to partnering with people regarding medication management, the longer I practice psychiatry, the more my passion to work with people in psychotherapy continues to increase.