Some Australian reflections on problems with recruitment into the profession of psychiatry

Psychiatry has probably always been the least attractive of the medical specialties. The choice of psychiatry as a career has been consistently low in the English-speaking world over the past 50 years (British Medical Journal, 1973; Feifelet al, 1999; Brockington & Mumford, 2002). Over the past decade there has probably been a further decline in the proportion of medical graduates choosing to train in psychiatry (Sierles & Taylor, 1995; Feifelet al, 1999).