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What the difference is between your seeing a psychologist or your seeing a psychiatrist...

Dr. Emily Keram (Psychiatrist) describes PTSD treatment.

Transcript

So let me talk for a second about what the difference is

between you're seeing a psychologist

or you're seeing a psychiatrist.

There's a lot of overlap in what we do.

We both know how to treat PTSD.

It's just that in the VA system,

the tools that we use to help you are a little bit different

between the psychologists and the psychiatrists.

In most VA settings, the psychologists will be the ones

who are doing individual and group therapy, and like I said,

there may be different types of therapy

with different techniques, depending on your symptoms.

The psychiatrists are usually the folks who are going

to prescribe medication to you that will help

with the disordered chemistry that you're dealing with

as a result of your trauma experience.

So we prescribe medications, mostly,

although we also know how to do therapy.

And the psychologists do the therapy in the VA system,

but they are also usually very knowledgeable about medications

because we've been working together for so long.

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