I love the field, and for that reason I believe my tolerance for some of the frustrations that can happen in this field are probably more than the typical doctor that is neutral or prefers to steer away from psychiatry.
Several things that keep people away from psychiatry make me think its more interesting. e.g. Talking to patients, and actually trying to get to know them, vs just giving their medication, observing the patient to see if you see any changes on a behavioral level in addition to the person's subjective report of their mental status, more active application of the law with practice (e.g. commitment laws)....
Several of the frustrations I've had with the field are ones I'd have in any field of medicine. E.g. in the hospitals, other departments may turf their patients to you. It'll happen in any field.
In terms of lifestyle, a psychiatrist's stress will of course vary with the specific type of job. There's inpatient (long vs short term), outpatient, crisis, consult, forensic, etc. It depends. All the specific jobs though IMHO are largely less stressful than other fields of medicine. Compare psychiatry to surgery where you will often times be woken in the middle of the night, or IM where at least where I did residency, I spent hours a day just looking for charts, and on my feet almost all the time (with several blisters by the end of the rotation).
If there has been anything specific to this field that has been frustrating-the one thing I can think of that may affect a medical student's decision is your cumulative medical knowledge will not be used as much vs the other fields of medicine. This is frustrating for many who enter psychiatry because M.D.s have spent so many hard years accumulating so much of it, and then it is not used as much as in other fields. (It will however be used--especially in consult liason or psychosomatic psychiatry).
Another factor that may cause frustration is often times I get a patient transferred to me (or in my fellowship, I have to evaluate them for the court) and the treatment team including the doctor wrote "the patient is paranoid" but gave no specific examples supporting their conclusion. In our field which is more subjective, it is even more important to justify our conclusions on documents. It is frustrating for me to interview a patient, and see no justification for the previous doctor's conclusion, when I'm not finding much reason to agree with that conclusion. In fact I've had several instances where I get the occasional "WTF?" and it turned out the previous doctor was completely off the mark. During those times, I can get upset--because IMHO its unprofessional to label a 29 year old as having dementia, when the person shows not even 1 symptom of the disorder, and then to fish through a chart for hours to understand why the previous doctor made this diagnosis, and not being able to find any reason whatsoever can be even more frustrating.
However I think that too can happen in any other field of medicine, just that since psychiatry is more subjective, you're going to have a lot more reading to do in the chart vs just looking up the data in the lab section.
One particular frustration is having the specific type of patient willing to hold you hostage in the crisis center, giving behaviors that clearly indicate the person is not mentally ill, but then making terroristic demands such as "give me a sandwich or I'll kill myself bitch". With time, you'll figure out how to deal with this issue, but it is very frustrating for a new resident to see this type of manipulative patient.
As frustrating as this thing is, you can also see it as a challenge. Each field has things that can make it tough, or in the eyes of others a more rewarding challenge. IMHO--the above case is one of the challenging things in our field. Its easy to have a depressed patient, simply give them an antidepressant and they feel better. It is a thinking man's challenge to figure out manipulative patients, and try to work with them in a positive manner that stops their manipulation.
