Welcome to Back from the Abyss. I'm Dr. Craig Keecock. This is a place for stories of healing and hope, recovery, and redemption.

Today, I want to explore the psychiatric treatment landscape.

Now, I've talked about in previous episodes how there's a real shortage of psychiatric care in the U.S.,

and I assume in other developed countries too.

And let me just give some statistics around that.

It turns out the U.S. is producing just over 2,000 psychiatrists a year, and that's been steady for a long time now.

And that is not going to go up because psychiatric training programs are long and expensive and federally

funded. And so we can pretty much assume that the number of graduating psychiatrists in

the U.S. is not going to go much above 2,000 a year anytime soon. It also turns out that half

of the psychiatrists in the United States are over 55, and yours truly is in that group. I am over 55.

And so there is a huge wave of psychiatric retirements coming, yet psychiatric demands in the United

States have never been higher.

And I think what we're finding is the reality is that the future of psychiatric treatment

for most people in the United States is going to be psychiatric nurse practitioners.

And for that reason and for a number of reasons, which we're going to explore in this

episode, I am a huge fan of psychiatric nurse practitioners.

I'm all in on them.

I've devoted most of my teaching and training to that.

I've shifted some of the emphasis of the podcast to really reach psychiatric nurse practitioners

because I'm really wanting to help them in their development.

But I also have some concerns about the training. I'm really wanting psych in peace to be able to

step up and give people the care that they deserve. So anyway, all these things were going through

...