Is there a quicker-than-traditional route to becoming a Psychiatrist?

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blueadams

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Hello,

I am a soon to be college graduate. I majored in psychology (non pre-med) and did my senior thesis in positive psychology. I had originally planned on getting a PhD in psychology and going into academia (or maybe getting a PhD in clinical psychology and going into practice). But more recently I have been looking at medical schools, and thus, post-bacc programs. So, if I chose to go into psychiatry, it's going to be a longer than normal process...1-2 yrs post-bacc + 4 yrs med school + 4-6 yrs residency, total 9-12 yrs (yikes!).

So, I was basically just wondering if there were any kind of accelerated programs for entering medical students that are 100% sure they want to go into psychiatry. Maybe some joint MD/PhD programs or something to cut out some of the residency years?

...FWIW, I am more interested in going into academia than I am in going into practice. There are two reasons I am leaning towards psychiatry, as opposed to psychology. #1) Money. Sorry to be so crude, but if I'm going to be teaching/researching, why not do it at a medical school and make twice as much as I would in a social science department? #2) The biological side of psychology. Earlier in my career as an undergraduate student, I was completely opposed to medication...believing that too many patients were being over-medicated. As I have learned more and more about the field, however, I have become much more open and curious about exploring and becoming familiar with ALL forms of treatment.

Hopefully someone on here knows something I don't!!

Thank you very much in advance for any help!

Sincerely,

Blue
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No, the minimum you would be looking at would be 4 years of med school and 4 years of psych residency (although if you were going into child psych, you could enter your child and adolescent fellowship after your 3rd year of residency, that fellowship is two years, so still not truly a shortcut).
While I commend you for your honesty, I will be one of the first of many who will tell you that the fabulous riches physicians make really aren't a great reason to go into the field. Although you may make less as a PhD, hopefully you also won't have wracked up nearly as much loan debt as most of us have in med school (the vast majority of us physicians graduate with at least $100,000 in debt - though at my school the average was actually more like $200,000).
Another thing to be aware of is that to be involved in the academic side of psychiatry, you need to get into an academic/research-oriented psych department, which tends to be more difficult than matching into any random community psych program. To be competitive for an academic psychiatry program, you will have to jump through numerous hoops that really don't have a lot to do with psychiatry/behavioral medicine (for example: you better know your antibiotics, renal physiology, biochemistry pathways, etc. if you want to have a decent score on Step 1...you'd better learn how to kiss the right butts in your clinical years so you don't get tripped up by poor evaluations in one of your other rotations lest the interviewers think you're trying to get into psych only because you didn't have what it takes to be a surgeon or ob/gyn). You're definitely right that it is a long road, and while it is do-able, if you enjoy many aspects of psychology, it may not really be worth it. I would recommend shadowing some non-psychiatric docs before you make any decisions to see how much you enjoy the other aspects of medicine, since for a number of years the non-psychiatric side of medicine will be the primary focus of your training. If you dislike the other areas of medicine, it will make the process a lot harder.
Best of luck to you in deciding.
 
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Why don't you volunteer at a free clinic or hospital or something similar to gain a better understanding of a physician's responsibilities? Besides, it's quite unlikely you'd gain admission to any med school without some volunteer experience anyway.

I appreciate your honesty with respect to your motivation. However, keep in mind that if you're interested in making a physician income, you're not likely to be all that well off if you're only teaching and don't have any clinical responsibilities.

You ability to succeed in becoming a psychiatrist will be contingent upon your completion of many years and long hours of study and patient care that involves all other facets of medicine and very, very little psychiatry.
If I may be blunt, I don't see anything in your post that would lead me to believe that medicine is a good fit for you and vice-versa. Please don't take offense, it is just my opinion.
 
No, there is no short route to becoming a psychiatrist.

Medications are serious. They can eff people up. It takes years:
-To learn normal
-To learn abnormal
-To diagnose abnormal
-To treat abnormal
-To manage abnormal
-To manage complications of treatment/management

Medicine doesn't happen in a vacum. The knowledge of medical school is pertinent. Your patients will show up pregnant. They will be train wreck cardiac patients on a mile long list of drugs. Do your psych meds interact? Do you know how to identify the laundry list of side effects of the medications you just prescribed? Is this person really psychotic or did no one notice the raging bed sore infection from the 350lbs who is bed ridden and elderly?

The only way to circumvent the time is to be a PA, NP, DNP, or psychologist in the two states that allow limited prescribing rights. I would suggest PA over the other options.

The time flies by faster than you would first think. No pain no gain. Take the plunge.
 
Sneezing said:
No, there is no short route to becoming a psychiatrist.

Medications are serious. They can eff people up. It takes years:
-To learn normal
-To learn abnormal
-To diagnose abnormal
-To treat abnormal
-To manage abnormal
-To manage complications of treatment/management

Medicine doesn't happen in a vacum. The knowledge of medical school is pertinent. Your patients will show up pregnant. They will be train wreck cardiac patients on a mile long list of drugs. Do your psych meds interact? Do you know how to identify the laundry list of side effects of the medications you just prescribed? Is this person really psychotic or did no one notice the raging bed sore infection from the 350lbs who is bed ridden and elderly?

The only way to circumvent the time is to be a PA, NP, DNP, or psychologist in the two states that allow limited prescribing rights. I would suggest PA over the other options.

The time flies by faster than you would first think. No pain no gain. Take the plunge.
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Very well said.
 
Sneezing said:
The only way to circumvent the time is to be a PA, NP, DNP, or psychologist in the two states that allow limited prescribing rights. I would suggest PA over the other options.

The time flies by faster than you would first think. No pain no gain. Take the plunge.
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It's not worth the hassle. ~7 to get licensed as a psychologist, and then another 1.5-2.0 years for the pharma classes and ~1 year (part-time) of residency. So you are at ~10 years....and still you can't prescribe in all 50 states.
 
Thank you all very much for the responses. They were very helpful!

#1) I actually have shadowed a number of physicians - two surgeons and two pediatricians (I was not able to find a psychiatrist that was willing to let me shadow him - patient privacy issues). My experience in that regard only reinforced my previous assumptions that my interests were in treating the mind, not the body. No offense to the other medical professions, but I just happen to find the human psyche so much more interesting than other field.

#2) So, as you might have guessed, I actually started off my undergraduate career as a pre-med (my first two years). I got accepted into some really prestigious schools out of high school, and unfortunately, I made the mistake of choosing to attend the most prestigious (in contrast with my girlfriend, who chose to attend a run of the mill state college, hardly studies, and is about to graduate as a 3.9 pre-med student). I found myself really struggling in courses I was not all that interested in...physics, orgo, chem, and to a lesser extent, bio...really busting my butt and getting B+'s. But in my psych courses (I was a psych major-pre-med), I was hardly giving any effort and getting straight A's. So, really, I just got kind of frustrated and made a short-sighted decision. I was 19. I just said hey, psychology is what I'm interested in, forget med school, I'll just be a psychologist.

#3) Now I'm 22 and about to graduate. I'm taking a much more serious and mature look at my career path. If I were to become a psychologist...it's about 5 years for the PhD, and about 2 years post-doc training, so 7 years total. 7 years of graduate school...to make slightly more than a high school teacher. Look, I really want to do some good work in this life, but I'd like to enjoy some perks as well. It's not like I'm talking about going into venture capital/private equity or anything here. 4 years of medical school, 3 years residency, 2 year child psych fellowship, that's 9 years total. In reality, about 2 more years of training than a psychologist. And about 3 times as much salary (loans aside). Not to mention an extensive knowledge of pharm treatments. Or the fact that there is a shortage of psychiatrists, and an abundance of psychologists in practice.

...I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a very strong math, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. student. I have a hard time in those classes, because, in comparision to psychology, I don't find them all that interesting (neurology, however, wow). But with that being said, I always have, and always will be a very hard worker. I think that I could push myself through a post-bacc program and med-school. I might not be able to get into the best med-school...or an academic psych residency, but that's alright. Being a practicing psychiatrist that does a little writing, research and teaching on the side would be more than fine with me.

Thoughts?
 
blueadams said:
My experience in that regard only reinforced my previous assumptions that my interests were in treating the mind, not the body.....

I found myself really struggling in courses I was not all that interested in...physics, orgo, chem, and to a lesser extent, bio....

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a very strong math, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. student. I have a hard time in those classes, because, in comparision to psychology, I don't find them all that interesting ...
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I'd be very careful about going into medicine, if I were you.

Once you start down the medical school path, you're pretty tied in to it due to pretty high loans. And if you're going to do a post-bac first, that's even more loan money. Factoring in psychiatry's relative low pay, the uncertainty about what that pay will look like in 10-12 years, the large loans and interest on those loans, the pay net between psychiatrist and psychologist will probably favor psychiatrist, but not by as much as you might expect.

Most people are quite happy in medical school but most people I've met who are bitter/miserable pursued medicine for reasons other than wanting to be a physician (parent pressure, prestige, money, etc.). Medical school is a hard long slog for anyone that doesn't want to be a physician first and foremost. It's particularly rough on those who don't like science (most of your first two years) or non-mind-based clinical medicine (most of your third and fourth years).

I get the impression that you essentially want to be a psychologist that makes more money than your average psychologist. Have you looked on SDN's psychologist forums and gotten input there?
 
notdeadyet said:
I get the impression that you essentially want to be a psychologist that makes more money than your average psychologist. Have you looked on SDN's psychologist forums and gotten input there?
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Pretty much. But also a more complete one. One that is familiar with both talk therapy and pharm treatment. I mean, obviously, med-school is going to be a drag for me not being a math and science person. But I think that I'm a hard enough worker to get through it. I might not do so great, but from what I understand, psychiatry residencies are one of the easier ones to get into. The real question is whether or not the rough 5-6 year patch of post-bacc and med school will be worth the end goal of being a psychiatrist as opposed to a psychologist.

I really appreciate you taking the time out of your, I'm sure, very busy day. But with all due respect, I think that you are seriously downplaying the difference in salary. The median psychologist earns $64,140 a year. The median psychiatrist earns $154,200 a year (both according to the us bls). That's almost three times as much. And we're talking about seven years of school versus nine years of school. Most psychologists that earn $100,000+ are the ones that (imho) sell out and go into industrial-organizational psychology, or do marriage counseling for fortune 500 execs. I'd personally rather spend my time helping the people that need it the most. The medical route is going to lead to more debt, obviously, but becoming a psychologist isn't free. There are few fully-funded PhD programs out there in clinical psychology, and they are reserved for only the very best and brightest. Talking about the decision in these terms almost makes it seem like a no-brainer.
 
blueadams said:
Pretty much. But also a more complete one. One that is familiar with both talk therapy and pharm treatment. I mean, obviously, med-school is going to be a drag for me not being a math and science person. But I think that I'm a hard enough worker to get through it. I might not do so great, but from what I understand, psychiatry residencies are one of the easier ones to get into. The real question is whether or not the rough 5-6 year patch of post-bacc and med school will be worth the end goal of being a psychiatrist as opposed to a psychologist.

I really appreciate you taking the time out of your, I'm sure, very busy day. But with all due respect, I think that you are seriously downplaying the difference in salary. The median psychologist earns $64,140 a year. The median psychiatrist earns $154,200 a year (both according to the us bls). That's almost three times as much. And we're talking about seven years of school versus nine years of school. Most psychologists that earn $100,000+ are the ones that (imho) sell out and go into industrial-organizational psychology, or do marriage counseling for fortune 500 execs. I'd personally rather spend my time helping the people that need it the most. The medical route is going to lead to more debt, obviously, but becoming a psychologist isn't free. There are few fully-funded PhD programs out there in clinical psychology, and they are reserved for only the very best and brightest. Talking about the decision in these terms almost makes it seem like a no-brainer.
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There is truth to much of what you are saying. It's like viewing a grizzly from 500 yards away. Yes, you can say it is bigger than black bear. You can see that it moves at the same speed of a black bear, a sauntering sort of sniff walk. You can also describe it as a better source of getting meat, because it has a larger size and relies more heavily on salmon for a diet (we're talking coastal here...).

What you need to do is stalk that bear. Get up reeeaaalll close. Right now you think that your .257 Roberts rifle is sufficient enough to drop this medical grizzly. At some point, you'll start to doubt how well prepared you are. This can happend once you are 30 yards from it or after you pull the trigger... Either way you'll quickly realize how effed you are as that angry beast is charging you. That's when you wish you had a larger caliber rifle.

You'll get a larger caliber rifle by having a broader more open mind when you respect the grizzly.
 
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Sneezing said:
There is truth to much of what you are saying. It's like viewing a grizzly from 500 yards away. Yes, you can say it is bigger than black bear. You can see that it moves at the same speed of a black bear, a sauntering sort of sniff walk. You can also describe it as a better source of getting meat, because it has a larger size and relies more heavily on salmon for a diet (we're talking coastal here...).

What you need to do is stalk that bear. Get up reeeaaalll close. Right now you think that your .257 Roberts rifle is sufficient enough to drop this medical grizzly. At some point, you'll start to doubt how well prepared you are. This can happend once you are 30 yards from it or after you pull the trigger... Either way you'll quickly realize how effed you are as that angry beast is charging you. That's when you wish you had a larger caliber rifle.

You'll get a larger caliber rifle by having a broader more open mind when you respect the grizzly.
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I'm not an idiot, if that's what you are implying. I got a 32 on the ACT and am about to graduate from a top 5 public university with about a 3.5 gpa. I think that I could at least handle a lower tier medical school. But with all that being said, I understand your point.
 
just go to med school man, its not as crazy difficult as everyone makes it out to be. if you can study hard enough to do well on the MCAT and your post-bacc.....and you got through those things without any problems, med school wont be bad either.
 
Oh come on, this thread is ridiculous. Give the OP a break. The motives of most of my med school classmates were far from flowery and high minded. If people who go TO medical school just love all areas of medicine so much, then why do SO MANY of them aspire to dermatology, radiology, ortho and blah blah blah? MOST people who go to medical school care about money from the get go.

Most of clinical medicine (and the preparation for it in med school) is barely even science, at best. Excuse me but "science" is done by people who make predictions and do experiments! Memorizing anatomy is not hard core science. This is not exactly particle physics we are talking about here. Medical school isn't very hard, it's just a great deal of work. Premed can actually be much harder, conceptually. Oh and there is a ton of kissing up to do to people in med school.

That said, someone who definitely prefers the social sciences won't exactly be happy in medicine either. And the loans really do pile up, what with capitalized interest especially. If you do a post-bacc and don't do well at bio, chem, physics, etc., you won't get into any medical school, and you'll have enough debt from that alone to sink a ship.
 
blueadams said:
I'm not an idiot, if that's what you are implying. I got a 32 on the ACT and am about to graduate from a top 5 public university with about a 3.5 gpa. I think that I could at least handle a lower tier medical school. But with all that being said, I understand your point.
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You seem somewhat arrogant and overly defensive. You have to actually get into med school first, which is by no means a sure thing in this case. You've admitted that the hard sciences (bio, chem, physics, math) aren't your strong suit...and a 3.5 cumulative GPA with mostly psychology courses won't impress admissions committees. You will have to do well in a post-bac program AND score well on the MCAT (med schools don't care about the ACT)...again lots of science on the MCAT too.

Then comes med school...usmle exams...if you fail those exams/don't pass your classes, then you may not graduate and be stuck with all those loans to repay.

Also, I don't know about you, but money isn't everything. If you're going to make more money but do so while being miserable toiling away in a career you don't have any real passion for, then is it really worth it?
 
blueadams said:
Most psychologists that earn $100,000+ are the ones that (imho) sell out and go into industrial-organizational psychology, or do marriage counseling for fortune 500 execs.
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:confused:

No offense, but this isn't even close to being accurate.

There are plenty of psychologists that earn $100k+ and aren't in I/O or "do marriage counseling for fortune 500 execs", though there are also a lot of psychologists that will take less for lifestyle and/or other issues. We admittedly have issues with compensation in the field, and it should be a consideration, but your generalizations are pretty off.

Given your description, I'm not sure if either route(psychology or psychiatry) is appropriate for you. A psychiatrist is a physician first, so you need to be competent in all of the medical areas, and not just the ones you like. A psychologist does more than just therapy, and I'm not sure cranking out a dissertation and jumping through the other hoops will meet your needs. I'd suggest taking some more time to really investigate the various career opportunities, as your understanding of the fields seems to be superficial at best.
 
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Therapist4Chnge said:
I'd suggest taking some more time to really investigate the various career opportunities, as your understanding of the fields seems to be superficial at best.
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That's what I alluded to with the grizzly talk.
 
If I were to become a psychologist...it's about 5 years for the PhD, and about 2 years post-doc training, so 7 years total. 7 years of graduate school...to make slightly more than a high school teacher. Thoughts?

There is money to be made in psychology. It may not be as automatic or as 'guaranteed' as psychiatry, but you can do quite well if you are well-trained and have some business sense about you. My practice is literally bursting at the seams and I am always looking for clinicians to whom I can send overflow referrals. All of the psychologists in my area who are in private practice are as busy as they want to be and those who work full-time are making well above $100k net - and this is direct clinical work. They aren't treating the Fortune 500 bunch or doing I/O. Clearly, this is substantially better than the typical high school teacher.
 
The motives of most of my med school classmates were far from flowery and high minded. If people who go TO medical school just love all areas of medicine so much, then why do SO MANY of them aspire to dermatology, radiology, ortho and blah blah blah? MOST people who go to medical school care about money from the get go.
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Agree.

I think one of the reasons why I actually came up with as much success as I've had in the field is because I actually like what I'm doing. I know so many doctors (psychiatry or not) that do mediocre work that had USMLE scores better than mine. My opinion is these other doctors may have tested better than me, but they don't give much of a damn about their patients. They'd rather get out ASAP and be home instead of reading the journals and double checking if there was anything else they could've done.

I've rarely seen someone go into pretty much any job because they oh just love that field and would do it if it paid a lot less. I won't lie. The money does help, but my love for the field makes this a dream job for me. Good pay and I love what I'm doing.

As for medschool not being that difficult, I disagree, but I'm in a weird boat. My Meyers-Briggs profile literally put me in the category that would hate medical school the most. This actually was studied (aw nuts--the guy that presented the study was at Jefferson, forgot his name).

I hated medical school. I thought the pimping was the sign of a narcisstic doctor, the culture of abusing the resident was ridiculous and medical professors cared so much more about the grades and standardized test scores than the actual true quality of the person's real ability to be a physician.

It was the worst time in my life-but I say that with the clear admission that I'm in what may be an outlier category.
 
whopper said:
As for medschool not being that difficult, I disagree, but I'm in a weird boat. My Meyers-Briggs profile literally put me in the category that would hate medical school the most. This actually was studied (aw nuts--the guy that presented the study was at Jefferson, forgot his name).
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Would that be INFP?
 
the grass is always greener on the other side. hope you enjoy afterbirth and manually disempacting poop!
 
whopper said:
As for medschool not being that difficult, I disagree, but I'm in a weird boat.

I hated medical school. I thought the pimping was the sign of a narcisstic doctor, the culture of abusing the resident was ridiculous and medical professors cared so much more about the grades and standardized test scores than the actual true quality of the person's real ability to be a physician.

It was the worst time in my life
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fyi, you are not in a weird boat. you are in the normal boat. and i'm in there with you.
 
You seem somewhat arrogant and overly defensive. You have to actually get into med school first, which is by no means a sure thing in this case. You've admitted that the hard sciences (bio, chem, physics, math) aren't your strong suit...and a 3.5 cumulative GPA with mostly psychology courses won't impress admissions committees. You will have to do well in a post-bac program AND score well on the MCAT (med schools don't care about the ACT)...again lots of science on the MCAT too.
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I don't know Blueadams well, but let me say something in his defense. This is not because I now this to be his case, but it was the case of several I've seen.

Several ultra-competitive for pre-med undergraduate schools are notorious for weeding out people that otherwise would've been great doctors. Some examples are NYU, Rutgers, Johns Hopkins, UCLA among others. They typically make a large amount of the class get a C or worse. You could work till you drop, have been a very smart high school student, and still fight hard to just get over a C.

Then there are schools, not as prestigious or competitive, and so long as you work hard, you are very likely to get an A.

BlueAdams mentioned that was his situation. The story is believable and I too was in that situation. My psychology GPA was over a 3.8, and until I transferred to Rutgers, my science GPA was about a 3.8. It got blown out of the water after Rutgers. IT was the first time in my life where I saw very poor teaching, and grading based on very abitrary and Darwinistic guidelines (e.g.- anyone below the mean fails, only the top 5% of the class get an A.)

Several people in this situation who might've gone to a less competitive school would've most likely gotten into medical school. It's unfair, but it happens.

And several in that situation are labelled as too "dumb" or "lazy" to get into medical school when in reality several of their friends in less competitive schools with GPAs over 3.5 did not work anywhere near as hard.

You may argue, "well those people in the less competitive schools won't do well on their MCATs." Maybe so, but that hasn't been my experience. In fact, quite the opposite. When I was in Syracuse, I felt the faculty actually wanted to teach me, while in R.U. the professors didn't seem to care if you learned. I learned more at SU but the learning was more enjoyable, less work (because it was well taught) and I feel had I stayed there I would've done better on the MCATs. It's funny because I did best on the biology section--the section where I took my classes at S.U. and worse on the physical sciences section--those were the classes all from Rutgers.

I'm getting an impression that BlueAdams may be in the category I mentioned, as a result is very frustrated seeing his friends in other schools have less obstacles than he had to face. Hence the comment that he mentioned that you may have felt was defensive. I've been in a similar situation myself and was very angry with the system at R.U.
 
whopper said:
BlueAdams mentioned that was his situation. The story is believable and I too was in that situation. My psychology GPA was over a 3.8, and until I transferred to Rutgers, my science GPA was about a 3.8. It got blown out of the water after Rutgers. IT was the first time in my life where I saw very poor teaching, and grading based on very abitrary and Darwinistic guidelines (e.g.- anyone below the mean fails, only the top 5% of the class get an A.)
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Their engineering classes are notorious for this approach.
 
It's funny because the freshman honor society only accepts freshman with a GPA over 3.5.

If you actually get into it in many of the weed-out schools you'll notice that almost no engineers or pre-meds are there. Those are the 2 groups that in high school were often the most intelligent. Instead, you'll often see the freshman honor society filled with art majors because in many art schools, you simply show up to class, you get an A. (yeah yeah yeah, I know there's exceptions. My brother was in a weed-out art school where in one of the art majors, less than half of the class in that major--car design were allowed to graduate).

All this goes to show the problem I'm talking about. It's really all about the numbers and if you are in a state with a high pre-med population such as NY, NJ or California, and go to certain big universities there (some I mentioned), you are at high risk to be in a school willing to fail you out simply because of the numbers, not because you didn't have what it takes to be a doctor.

Contrast that with Princeton U. where a buddy of mine told me the professors almost always teach well, and when he took a class at RU (organic chemistry with me during the summer) he said it was one of the most difficult experiences of his life because of the weed-out style of teaching. The guy got over a 1400 on his SATs at age 14, got into Princeton at age 16 and I'm actually doing better than him in class because I was used to the weed out system. (which taught me the key to doing well was not learning the material, but figuring out the professor's trick to doing well--in that particular class--getting all the old exams and doing all of them. If you did enough, you'd get enough recycled questions to do well. Heck, one time I got a masters student of organic chemistry from a neighboring college-Princeton U. to do an exam I took home and he got a C+ on it. No I wasn't cheating. The exam was already done. I just out of curiosity wanted to see how well he'd do on it because I knew the class was bull.).

The chemistry lab final? The average grade was less than a 40%. My roommate who was the valedictorian of his high school got just over a 40% on it and studied till he dropped. I realized the entire thing was bs and out of spite I didn't study for it and I did just a few points below him.

Let's just say I'm not willing to donate any money to R.U. I was told several times to give up on being a medical doctor by my advisor who I thought was on my side. All the while, a buddy of my dad's who was a medical school dean kept telling me the true B.S. nature of the numbers game and encouraged me not to give up.

Their engineering classes are notorious for this approach.
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Yeah, and their liberal arts-honors program is a load of #$%#$. You simply showed up you got an A. (At least when I was there. Things may have changed). All the while all the engineers and pre-meds I saw were studying till they dropped and not knowing why they couldn't do well. By the time I figured out the system, the damage was already done to my GPA. I was able to salvage it because I figured out the system and still had a year and a half left in college-there's a trick to each science class at R.U. to get an A and learning the material for real was not the way to do it!

Things like getting old exams, or finding out ahead of time which of the 2 offered courses was the unfair one (Prof X fails 2/3 of the class Prof Y fails 10% of the class, but its the same course and same material) was the key. If you couldn't avoid the weed out class or figure out the "Trick", take it over the summer at a neighboring institution.
 
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if you are interested in academia, i.e. research, you could skip residency all together. of course, you could not do any practice then. Your salary in resarch will not be as high though. i am not sure how it compares to salary as a psychologist.

However, keep in mind you will have a huge debt after medical school ($3-400,000 at most private schools). If you intend to do research, do a phd. Perhaps a phd in neuroscience? You will get paid a nice stipend throughout graduate school and be more involved in the science side of things. I am sure you can find some PhDs that focus on/allows you to study pharmacology of psych drugs.

MD PhD programs will ADD another 4 years or so years to the training process, making it 14 years or so (2 post bac, 8 md phd, ~4 residency)

Sorry if this is not what you are getting at. I have not read all the posts.

Hope it helps.
Sonya
 
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