Choose Psychiatry 2022

We need your help to raise the profile of our annual recruitment campaign Choose Psychiatry, aimed at encouraging foundation doctors to choose psychiatry as their specialty.

Choose Psychiatry 2022 – Behind the scenes
Here’s a little behind-the-scenes preview of our main campaign video being filmed earlier this summer.

Due to the success of previous years, the campaign, now in its fifth year, will extend its remit to encourage core trainees to continue to Choose Psychiatry too.

With mental health referrals at record levels of 4.3m last year and a backlog of 1.4m people still waiting to start treatment, pressure on the NHS is likely to reach new unprecedented levels. But there are currently not enough psychiatrists to meet this ever-increasing demand.

It’s great that more and more recently qualified doctors are deciding to choose psychiatry, but we must continue to build on that momentum. Creating a stronger workforce is critical especially as some specialties are under-resourced.

To coincide with World Mental Health Day, this year’s Choose Psychiatry campaign will launch during October and run until the end of November. During this time, we’ll be calling on you – RCPsych Members – to help shout about the campaign and share our messages among your friends, colleagues, and networks.

This year’s campaign will include:

  • a campaign section on our website
  • a main campaign video
  • a full library of long and short campaign videos to be shared across our digital channels
  • a series of short videos about the different specialities within psychiatry
  • blog posts and newsletters
  • virtual and in-person events
  • webinars, Twitter Takeovers and more.

For the first time ever, we’ll be preparing a special toolkit to help you get involved across our digital channels. In the meantime, you can help by:

  • attending our events and/or encourage others who might be interested
  • record a quick video message and explain why you chose your psychiatric specialty and post it on Twitter using the hashtag #ChoosePsychiatry.

If you're social media savvy, please tag our Twitter accounts @rcpsych and/or @Choose_Psych. You can also tag a colleague too! We'd love to amplify your reasons for choosing psychiatry.

Read more to receive further information regarding a career in psychiatry