E. Fuller Torrey is an MD - not a psychiatrist - who wrote one of the more popular support books on schizophrenia. In it he recommends against assuming that a psychiatrist is the best type of doctor to care for your schizophrenia (or that of your loved ones) because schizophrenia is not a mental disorder, it's a mental disease characterized by a panoply of well-known and well-diagnosed organic maladies. He further argues that, well, psychiatrists are kind of off as a breed. The phrase he uses, which I wrote down, was "not all of the strangest birds in the menagerie are in cages."

I put a psychiatrist's daughter through social work school. Like everyone else in the family she was a laundry list of psychological disorders and past mental trauma. It meant hanging out with a bunch of social workers. As a tribe, they are a broken people. Nobody pays $80k to spend two years in school to earn $16 an hour snatching babies out of labor&delivery. There's a drive there, and it's not one that fits well in ordinary culture. The normies tend to wash out and go into human resources.

Which doesn't mean that psychiatry is a profession purely for crazy weirdos or that social workers are universally codependent wounded warriors. I've known plenty of sane, sensible people who are making the world better one client at a time. The trick is to figure out how to give without giving everything.

You're going to figure that trick out. You might even get a house out of the deal. Jeffrey Sachs seems to do okay.