Michael Asbach: Hi, everyone. My name is Mike Aach. I'm a psychiatric P A and I've worked in Psychiatry for the past 12 years. I currently serve as the Associate Director of Interventional Psychiatry at Dent Neurologic Institute. The A P A has asked me to give a little bit of insight of why I picked psychiatry. The story goes back all the way to school. My first rotation out of didactic was in mental health. I was in ROTC and I knew I wanted to join the army after I graduated from P A school. So I picked to do my behavior health rotation at a inpatient PT SS D clinic with the VA I didn't think I was necessarily gonna do psychiatry, but I had an interest in veterans, certainly had an interest in veterans mental health. I loved it the entire month that I was there. I just, it was great. I loved meeting all these people. Vietnam vets, Korean vets Oefoaf guys. I enjoyed the combination of psychotherapy medication management with the psychiatrist, but then also recreational therapy doing, you know, lawn games and going on fishing outings. It was just a ton of fun at the time. I didn't really necessarily see psychiatry as my calling, but rather just assume that I enjoyed it because it was my first rotation. And I was happy to not be in a classroom. At the end of my clinical rotations, I was applying for jobs. I had many job offers in both orthopedics and then also a couple in general surgery as well. And the job offers were great, but they were all very similar in the sense that they were very high demand and didn't really come with a great work life balance. At the time, I was already married, my wife and I wanted to start a family sooner than later. And the idea of having a surgery job that would require me to work on Christmas or be called in on New Year's. I just didn't really like the idea of that on a flyer. I applied for a psychiatry position that was open. My wife actually encouraged me to do it reminded me that I really enjoyed my clinical rotation as a student. And within five minutes of sitting down for the interview, I knew I was home. One of the reasons I love psychiatry is that it's still a field of medicine where art matters. It's not cookbook, there's no objective tests, there's no diagnostic imaging that we can do to confirm. But rather the only thing that we have to go off of as a, as a mental health provider is our interview. Our relationship with the patient. So the questions we ask, how we make the patient feel comfortable enough to answer. Even when the questions are very intimate and uncomfortable is what drives the quality of care. It's also a ton of fun to have patients that now I've been seeing since they were little. I have patients that were in high school when I started seeing them who are now married and having babies of their own. So there's longitudinal relationships with psychiatry as well that just make the, the field really gratifying and meaningful.
