Psychiatrist job description
1,486 verified openings in Physicians & Advanced Practice
The line between psychiatry and psychology is a medical degree. Psychiatrists finish medical school and a psychiatry residency, and they prescribe and administer medication as well as psychotherapy, which is why BLS calls them the primary mental health physicians. The median wage was $281,870 in May 2025, a little above the $275,930 for physicians and surgeons overall and well clear of family medicine at $244,180. The spread underneath is wide, $84,060 to $446,520 between the tenth and ninetieth percentiles.
Core Duties and Responsibilities
Prescribing, directing, or administering treatment for mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders is the center of the work. Around it: individualized care plans drawing on several treatments at once, patient histories gathered from relatives and other clinicians, laboratory and diagnostic tests ordered to establish what is physical, outpatient counseling, and case reports to government and mental health agencies. Psychiatrists collaborate with and often direct teams of psychologists, counselors, social workers, psychiatric nurses, and psychiatric technicians. This is one of medicine's smaller specialties, 30,000 practitioners in 2025 against 114,300 in family medicine, and hours can run long or irregular with call attached to hospital practice.
Common Skills and Technologies
Active listening scores highest of any skill in this occupation and social perceptiveness comes next, ahead of the science knowledge, because most of the diagnostic evidence arrives in conversation. Records and orders move through the same hospital software as the rest of medicine, MEDITECH and Epic carrying the chart and the prescription, with Outlook and Excel around the edges of scheduling and reporting.
Education, Training, and Career Path
Credentialing matches the rest of medicine: medical school, a psychiatry residency, a state license, and board certification that remains voluntary but is widespread. Most survey answers set the entry expectation at post-doctoral training, 59 percent of them, with 34 percent giving a doctorate and the last few points spread across master's and first professional degrees. What differs is the demand waiting on the other side. BLS projects psychiatry growing 7 percent from 2025 to 2035 against 4 percent for physicians as a whole, adding about 2,100 positions, and attributes the gap to rising demand for psychiatric care and improved access to mental health services.
Sources: O*NET 30.0, 29-1223.00 Psychiatrists, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/29-1223.00. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 29-1223, https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm. BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/physicians-and-surgeons.htm.