Becoming a psychiatrist specifically hasn't changed me a ton, not nearly to the same degree as becoming a doctor. I would say that medicine and intern year changed me the most, turning me into an impatient person towards everyone outside of the clinic room. Since then I lament having to entertain or socialize with people, and want to get to the part where we simply understand each other or find that we don't like each other and there's no point - psychiatry training has made it faster for me to get to that point, which probably has its pros and cons.
This bothers me the most with my interactions with family. I am not sure if I had more external impatience with family in the past, but I can say the internal impatience amplified following the stress of med school and intern year. It also seemed to ruin much of my social skills and confidence as well, but these have at least gradually come back.
All the other stuff you guys are mentioning (e.g. not caring what people think, cutting others slack, not being bothered by small things as much) I got that from aging into my 20s prior to medicine. The benefits of being career changer/non-trad.
The pandemic sucked though. Training during the pandemic was terrible, especially being on inpatient medicine, critical care, and EM rotations. It sucked. I have not recovered, and I don't know when I will. To be fair having more children also happened around that time, so who's to say what's burning me out more.
As an attending, I find it all a bit anticlimactic. The goals I had even leaving residency seem to be much harder to accomplish, adjusting to new people, personalities and part of the country is draining, and having young children and elderly parents to take care of fills any waking moment not spent at work. I never had any expectations for the "marvels" of psychopharm or the "insight" of psychology, so for me I was pleasantly surprised by some of it in training and never had to grapple with the disappointment that others have experienced.
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During my child training, seeing the horror inflicted upon children somehow made me more interested in doing anything I can to care for them rather than sour me to human existence. From what I've heard from others, I may be in a minority with my response to this all. I see some positive societal shifts with less acceptance around child abuse and hope to see a lot more of that before my career is over.
So interestingly my child psych experiences in med school overlapped very much with this and its mainly why I chose my current career path. It also taught me that the personal psychological anguish that I feared I would experience in psychiatry wasn't nearly as bad as I thought, even when faced with the horror of children with immense trauma.
At the same time, I'm a lot less empathetic and have less tolerance for complaints about minor stressors. It may be an effect of having my outpatient year of residency during the first year of the pandemic, but I'm actually a less patient person than I used to be.
It didn't bother me as much as you (maybe because outpatient year was a welcome break from the chaos of medicine, EM, and ICU that I was coming from during the early days of the pandemic), but I will say the pandemic certainly exposed the lack of tolerance to change in many people. A lot of people seemed to have very limited healthy coping mechanisms for mild to moderate stressors, and nothing seemed to exemplify that more than the pandemic. To be fair, I also think that in medicine we are hammered to be more dynamic and accommodate to having less control of the environment around us (maybe a byproduct of MS3-4) so it may just be a lot more obvious to us.
