Hi, I’m Dr. Bud Holcomb. I’ve been a practicing board certified psychiatrist in Austin, Texas for the past 20 years. I would like to make a series of videos that helps people recognize psychiatric disorders and hopefully get on the path to good professional treatment. In my opinion, psychiatry is the most important branch of medicine because people with mental health disorders suffer every minute of their lives.
Not only do they suffer, but so do their loved ones. Also, in my opinion, our current medical system is completely broken and access to good professional care is both very expensive and very limited. So I hope these series of videos can help people recognize disorders and take steps towards effective treatment.
To start off – w hat I’d like to say is the symptom that most people suffer regardless of their diagnosis is anxiety. They say that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow. We have at least a hundred words for anxiety, stress, tension, worry. I also think it’s important to point out that anxiety and anger are flip sides of the same thing, in my opinion.
When we internalize it or stuff, it, we experience and suffer anxiety or stress. When we open it up, it comes out as anger or acting out in angry or aggressive ways in anger always destroys. Gaining access to good therapy is generally a lot easier than finding psychiatric prescribers. There’s a lot of people running around calling themselves therapists.
I think it’s important to not worry about what kind of therapy that the particular therapist practices, but that it is important to find a professionally trained therapist and by professionally trained, I mean, train to the master’s degree level, which could be an LPC or a licensed professional counselor, an MSW, or certainly a PhD in psychotherapy.
Working with a therapist will also provide diagnostic clarification, which could help a primary care doctor make good choices in medication management. We’ll explore each of these topics more specifically in future videos.
However, as a broad overview, if people are suffering emotional distress or psychiatric disorders, I’d like them to think first take away anything that’s making it worse (and we’re referring to alcohol and drugs) and prescribe as few pills as possible to reduce the symptoms and add in good therapy with a professionally trained counselor to address it at the source.
Thank you very much.
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