What is a pediatric psychiatrist?
A pediatric psychiatrist is a doctor with a medical degree who specializes in treating children with psychiatric illnesses. A child psychiatrist has completed at least four years of undergraduate college to obtain a bachelors degree, four years of medical school to receive a doctor of medicine degree, a one-year medical internship, three years of general residency training in psychiatry and two additional years of fellowship training in pediatric psychiatry. Pediatric psychiatrists are capable of providing both talk therapy and medications to their patients.
A pediatric psychiatrist can also be called a child psychiatrist. All psychiatrists are medical doctors who have completed medical school. Upon this completion they specialize in psychiatry, and some, after becoming licensed psychiatrists, spend a couple more years in the study and practice of child psychiatry. They are essentially highly specialized doctors skilled at working with children who exhibit mental disorders or who have developmental conditions like retardation, significant learning disabilities, or things like Tourette syndrome. It’s recognized in the psychiatric community that the treatment of children is different than the treatment of adults. Kids and teens are not little adults and they need specialized care tailored to them. Consideration of how to change or titrate medication dosages, how to administer therapy and how to best address mental or developmental disorders for children is important to the pediatric psychiatrist. These specialists usually also have direct in
