What’s the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist?

In the modern era, psychiatrists are medical doctors (MDs). This means they’ve gone to medical school and can prescribe medications. Psychologists typically have training culminating in a doctorate (PhD) degree. Historically, that's meant that psychologists don’t have prescribing privileges, but that’s changing through legislation in many states where limited prescribing privileges are granted to those who undergo additional training.

Both psychiatrists and psychologists are trained in psychotherapy or “talk therapy,” though the amount of specific psychotherapy training might vary significantly between individual providers, whether we’re talking about psychiatrists or psychologists. Note also that many other providers, like marriage and family therapists (MFTs) and social workers, also do psychotherapy and refer to themselves as psychotherapists.

As a medical subspecialty, psychiatry’s main focus is on psychopathology and the treatment of mental disorders, which to a certain extent are defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Psychology is a much broader discipline that extends beyond treating mental disorders in its aim to study and understand all mental phenomena—how we think, reason, feel, and behave—whether normal and abnormal.