Editor’s note: Career Choices features a psychiatry resident/fellow interviewing a psychiatrist about why he or she has chosen a specific career path. The goal is to inform trainees about the various psychiatric career options, and to give them a feel for the pros and cons of the various paths.
In this Career Choices, Saeed Ahmed, MD, Addiction Psychiatry Fellow at Boston University, talked with William Pirl, MD, MPH, FACLP, FAPOS. Dr. Pirl is Associate Professor, Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. He joined Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2018 as Vice Chair for Psychosocial Oncology, Department of Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care. He is a past president of the American Psychosocial Oncology Society and North American Associate Editor for the journal Psycho-Oncology.
Dr. Ahmed: What made you choose the psychiatric oncology track, and how did your training lead you towards this path?
Dr. Pirl: I went to medical school thinking that I wanted to be a psychiatrist. However, I was really drawn to internal medicine, especially the process of sorting through medical differential diagnoses. I was deciding between applying for residency in medicine or psychiatry when I did an elective rotation in consultation-liaison (CL) psychiatry. Consultation-liaison psychiatry combined both medicine and psychiatry, which is exactly what I wanted to do. After residency, I wanted to do a CL fellowship outside of Boston, which is where I had done all of my medical education and training. One of my residency advisors suggested Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and I ended up going there. On the first day of fellowship, I realized that I’d only be working with cancer over that year, which I had not really thought about beforehand. Luckily, I loved it, and over the year I realized that the work had tremendous impact and meaning.
Dr. Ahmed: What are some of the pros and cons of working in psychiatric oncology?
Dr. Pirl: Things that I think are pros might be cons for some people. Consults in psychiatric oncology tend to be more relationship-based than they might be in other CL subspecialties. Oncology clinicians want to know who they are referring their patients to, and they are used to team-based care. If you like practicing as part of a multidisciplinary team, this is a pro.
Psychiatric oncology has more focus on existential issues, which interests me more than some other things in psychiatry. Bearing witness to so much tragedy can be a con at times, but psychiatrists who do this work learn ways to manage this within themselves. Psychiatric oncology also offers many experiences where you can see how much impact you make. It’s rewarding to see results and get positive feedback from patients and their families.
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