Nope, high acuity psych RN (although I recently moved to a lower acuity hospital who will treat me better). Doctors are doctors. Psych does a looot more medical than you would think.

a) psych patients have difficulty caring and advocating for their health and are often exposed to dangerous situations like being homeless and exposed to the elements. Psych drugs and street drugs and general reduced self care are also REALLY hard on the teeth and you would be shocked how much your teeth affect your overall health

b) ERs will see a psych history in a chart and write off literally any symptom as a psych issue. You’ll get little old ladies they say have dementia who really just have utis, thyroid imbalances, severe vitamin and mineral deficiencies, and every once in a while something serious like hypoxia or a stroke that they call psych because the patient was unpleasant enough while sick that they didn’t wanna deal with it so they didn’t assess fully. It’s your problem now! Watchu gonna do about it?

And a good GP is worth their weight in gold, especially out in the sticks you’re often the only Healthcare a lot of people ever really get (look at dr glaucomfleckens YouTube shorts on rural med if you need a good laugh tonight). So you’re gonna see a lot of the same stuff the psych does but less weirdness and more medical (but not too much different in either way lol).

But for either job you need a very accurate and sensitive bullshit / “something just ain’t right here” meter. I have met so many docs, even some crap psychiatrists, who just have 0 critical thinking or situational awareness skills.

So for instance if you have a wandering little old lady that sucks and I just need to keep a good eye on her and go pull her out of other people’s rooms quickly when I see her going. But if she’s wandering AND a lil frisky? I need a 1:1 care order and maybe some heavy duty emergency agitation meds before I’m peeling her out of somebody else’s bed and having to call the state about a sexual assault incident. That one little detail completely changes the entire situation and you have to have some common sense to be able to manage it. And common sense ain’t as common as you’d hope.

Same for the GP; if a domestic violence victim comes in for something unrelated like a bladder infection, are you gonna spot the old and new bruises and charged demeanor from the last time you saw them? And what’re you gonna do about it?

Sure you’re not an intensivist handling strokes PEs and kidney failure or an emergency doc responding to gunshots MVAs and heart attacks but you’re trading it for knowing how to deal with people and both the intensivist and ED doc would probably both admit to you that that TERRIFIES them. I myself like working overnight high acuity with a violent meth detoxer telling me how they’re going to rape and murder me all night because visiting hours end immediately after my shift starts so I get to kick out their weirdly overly involved mother who is in the bed with them under the blankets spoon feeding them and I don’t have to explain to her that it’s really because she’s fucking creepy and if she wasn’t a weirdo she could’ve maybe got 15 more minutes.