Sympathy for Psychiatrists


Rescuing dozens of emotionally tortured people every day is not a profession; it’s an instinct, a calling, a relentless pull toward the places where pain festers unseen. 


One doesn’t wear a white coat or wield a clipboard—no, the tools are far older: presence, patience, and the stubborn refusal to look away from another’s suffering. People open up not because of credentials, but because they sense that—at last—someone is actually listening. And in that moment, something miraculous happens. They mistake you for a therapist.


And why wouldn’t they? After all, you’re doing what therapy was meant to be: human, compassionate, curious, and courageous. You’re not ticking diagnostic boxes or chasing insurance codes. You’re sitting in the dark with them until their eyes adjust and they can begin to see themselves clearly.


This is, understandably, frustrating for psychiatrists. Not because they are cruel or stupid, but because they have been shackled by a system that taught them to reduce people to symptoms. They are as trapped as the rest of us—hemmed in by training that prizes detachment over connection, theory over lived truth. Many of them went into the field out of a genuine desire to help, but somewhere along the way, they were pulled off course by the gravity of textbooks, protocols, and pharmaceutical algorithms.


They are fallible, fragile humans too. Most are exhausted, carrying the weight of unspoken traumas of their own, silenced by the very culture they serve. They don’t need ridicule—they need guidance. A reminder that healing is not found in jargon, but in the gutsy vulnerability of being with another person, soul to soul.


The fact that unqualified “nobodies” are doing this work—quietly, consistently, online and off—ought not to humiliate psychiatrists, but inspire them. There is no shame in not knowing what they were never taught. But there is power, tremendous power, in unlearning.


So let the rescue continue. Let the heart guide what academia forgot. And let those in white coats be welcomed back—not to the ivory tower, but to the human fold, where empathy is the first and last prescription.


Liz Lucy Robillard and chatgpt 9/05/25


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