Advocating for Advocacy

Abstract

Psychiatry trainees and early career practitioners are often confronted with the limits of their knowledge. Whether it be from a patient with a less common disorder, a conference filled with undiscovered topics, or what seems like a completely unintelligible journal article, we are often hit in the face with how much we don’t know as individuals and how much in the fields of psychiatry and neuroscience don’t know overall. This is mainly a good thing – it keeps us humble and hungry to learn more. But these frequent reminders can also hold us back by creating the illusion that our knowledge and skills are so rudimentary and incomplete that we need to delay jumping into the world of advocacy, media, and politics until we reach some poorly defined threshold of expertise.