In Europe, being a psychiatric patient is like being the passenger of a pilot who learned to fly by reading about it

Abstract

An inquiry among the 150 participating trainees and trainers from 24 European countries (mainly from Western European countries), at the Annual EFPT Symposium revealed that in most countries live supervision and observation are not used in training. To make matters even worse, psychiatry trainees hardly get any supervision at all. About one third of the participants never observed a senior psychiatrist in interaction with a patient during the course of their training. Half of the participants were never observed while interacting with a patient during the course of their training. The author elaborates on five of the reasons why live supervision and observation are indispensable tools for training psychiatrists. He concludes that it is unethical to permit trainees to become psychiatrists without this kind of training. For psychiatry to become a profession earning more respect from the other medical professionals and the general public, it is necessary that senior psychiatrists pay more respect to their own profession by giving trainees an adequate training in the craftsmanship of psychiatry.