Unfortunately, they're overwhelmed by the majority, which are full of pseudoscience.
Maybe the more rigorous ones should change their titles, not to be associated with standard "psychologists" anymore?
I have been recommending that serious students, those who want to avoid the stigma of psychology, enter the field of neuroscience instead. Neuroscience will eventually replace psychiatry and psychology as the preferred approach to treating what we now call "mental illnesses", most of which are actually biological illnesses with mental symptoms. Reference:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-s...
Psychiatrists are medicals doctors treating the organ "brain". It's pretty much interchangeable with neuroscience. And before once changes, one should reason very carefully, because they are completely different, and medical school is very hard, while one says that psychology tends to be easy. Also there is not much new about this approach. It's probably as old as psychology. Maybe one could say psychology developed from the former. Pawlov for example was a physiologist.
/e Well, no they are not interchangeable. A psychiatrists does not research about bionic eyes. But the way they see human psyche is pretty much.
Psychiatry and psychology are branches of human psychology -- both rely on the study of human psychology for validation. And if human psychology were a rigorous, empirical science, people wouldn't be able to say, as you just have, the psychiatry and psychology do not have much in common.
Would you say the same thing about cosmology and particle physics? They're very different -- one studies events at the smallest possible scale, the other at the largest possible scale. But no one suggests that they're unrelated to either each other or to their parent field of physics. The reason is they're sciences.
> Psychiatrists are medicals doctors treating the organ "brain".
No, that's false -- you just described the field of neuroscience (except that neuroscience is more a research than a medical field at the moment). Psychiatrists are psychologists with a medical degree, they are not neuroscientists, and they treat the mind, not the brain.
> It's pretty much interchangeable with neuroscience.
Not remotely. Neuroscience studies the brain and nervous system, psychiatry is a branch of psychology that studies the mind.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatry
Quote: "Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders."
Note the phrase "mental disorders," i.e. disorders of the mind. Not "brain disorders".
\snark.
Yep. I'm hearing "cognitive neuroscientist" more often, even though those so named haven't changed their practice and are still psychologists.
