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Psychiatrist or Psychologist? A Plain-English Guide for Expats in Moscow

If you’re looking for mental health support in Moscow and you’re not sure whether you need a psychiatrist or a psychologist, you’re not alone — the two professions overlap in the public imagination more than they do in practice. This article explains the practical difference between them, so you can make a more informed decision about where to start. It’s general information, not a substitute for an actual conversation with a professional about your own situation.

The short version

A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who can diagnose mental health conditions, assess for medication where appropriate, and treat conditions that have a strong biological or acute component. A psychologist or psychotherapist works with you primarily through talk-based therapy — helping you understand and change patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving, without prescribing medication. Many people benefit from working with both, and the two roles are often designed to work together rather than as alternatives to each other.

What a psychiatrist does

A psychiatrist’s starting point is a thorough assessment — understanding your history, your current difficulties, and ruling out other explanations for what you’re experiencing. From there, a psychiatrist can help with conditions such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and other mental health conditions, and — where it’s appropriate — assess whether medication could help as part of your care.

What a psychologist or psychotherapist does

A psychologist or psychotherapist works with you through structured talk therapy. This might include cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), or schema therapy, depending on what fits your situation. The focus is on understanding patterns — in thoughts, emotions, relationships, or behaviour — and building practical ways to work with them. This route doesn’t involve medication.

Why the two often work together

In practice, psychiatry and psychology frequently aren’t an either/or choice. A common model is that psychiatric care addresses more acute symptoms — sometimes with medication as part of the picture — while psychological therapy offers the ongoing, talk-based work of understanding and changing patterns. Many people are supported by a psychiatrist and a psychologist working as a team, each covering a different part of the picture, rather than by choosing one role over the other permanently.

So which one do you need?

There’s no simple rule that maps a particular feeling or situation onto one profession or the other — and it’s worth being cautious of any source that claims otherwise. A reasonable starting point is to think about what you’re looking for:

You don’t need to work this out perfectly before reaching out. Getting an accurate picture is exactly what an initial conversation is for.

Getting started in Moscow, in English

Mental Health Center (MHC) provides mental health care in Moscow, in English, with both psychiatrists and psychologists on the team. If you’re not sure where to start, you don’t need to decide between the two on your own — contact our team in English and we can help you understand the available options.

Getting in touch doesn’t commit you to anything beyond finding out more — it’s simply a way to understand what’s available and take things from there.

Sources and further reading

Mental Health Center, Психиатр [Psychiatrist] — https://mhcenter.ru/clinic
Mental Health Center, Консультация психолога [Psychologist Consultation] — https://mhcenter.ru/psichology

Getting Help for ADHD in Moscow as an English Speaker

If you’re an English-speaking adult living in Moscow and you’ve started wondering whether attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might explain some of the difficulties you’ve been having — with focus, organisation, restlessness, or impulsivity — this article is meant to help you understand what an ADHD assessment actually involves, and what a reasonable next step looks like. It’s written to inform, not to diagnose. Nothing here is a substitute for talking to a qualified professional.

What can adult ADHD look like day to day?

ADHD is often associated with childhood, but it can look quite different in adults. Rather than obvious hyperactivity, many adults notice ongoing difficulty sustaining attention and concentration, or a pattern of “hyperfocus” — becoming so absorbed in one activity that it’s hard to switch away from it, sometimes at the expense of other things that need attention. Hyperactivity can show up more as inner restlessness than visible fidgeting. Impulsivity can cause friction at work or in relationships, and many adults describe a particular difficulty with longer-term planning — it’s not that the future doesn’t matter to them, but that it can be genuinely hard to weigh it against what feels urgent right now.

None of this is a checklist, and recognising one or two of these patterns in yourself doesn’t mean you have ADHD. These are simply common examples of what the experience can involve — a starting point for thinking about it, not a way to conclude anything on your own.

Can ADHD be diagnosed for the first time in adulthood?

Yes. ADHD can be diagnosed in adulthood, including in people who were not diagnosed as children. This doesn’t mean ADHD typically starts fresh in adult life, out of nowhere. Assessment usually looks at whether relevant difficulties were also present earlier in life — often stretching back to childhood or adolescence — even if nobody identified them as ADHD at the time. It’s common for adults to only make this connection later, sometimes after years of feeling like ordinary tasks required much more effort than they seemed to for other people.

Why an online checklist isn’t a diagnosis

ADHD symptom checklists and online quizzes are easy to find, and they can be a reasonable prompt to think more seriously about your own experience. But answering a checklist is not the same thing as being assessed. A proper assessment needs to look at your history in real depth, consider other explanations for what you’re experiencing, and understand how any difficulties actually affect different parts of your life — not simply whether you match a certain number of items on a list.

What a proper ADHD assessment generally involves

An ADHD diagnosis should be made by a healthcare professional with specific training and expertise in diagnosing and assessing ADHD — not assumed to be within the everyday scope of any psychiatrist or psychologist, and not reached from a short screening conversation alone. A thorough assessment typically looks at:

This is why an ADHD assessment is a process carried out by someone with the right specific training, rather than a single test or a quick judgement.

What if I was never assessed as a child?

Many adults living with undiagnosed ADHD were never assessed when they were young — sometimes because the difficulty wasn’t recognised at the time, sometimes because they found ways to manage that only became harder to sustain later in life, such as after starting a new job, moving to a new country, or taking on more responsibility. Not having a childhood diagnosis doesn’t rule anything out. What matters for an adult assessment is whether, looking back, there’s evidence that relevant difficulties were already present earlier in life — even if nobody named them at the time.

What a reasonable next step looks like

If some of this feels familiar, a reasonable next step is usually a conversation with a healthcare professional about arranging a proper assessment — rather than trying to reach a conclusion by yourself, or basing a decision purely on an online test. Having that conversation doesn’t commit you to anything beyond finding out more, and it’s the way to get an accurate picture of what’s actually going on, instead of guessing.

Getting in touch with MHC

Mental Health Center (MHC) provides mental health care in Moscow, including for adults, in English. If you would like to ask about the options currently available at MHC, contact our team in English:

Our team can explain the options currently available and help you arrange an appointment where appropriate. Getting in touch is simply a way to find out what’s possible — it doesn’t itself amount to an assessment or a diagnosis.

Sources and further reading

NICE, Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: diagnosis and management (NG87) — https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng87
Mental Health Center, СДВГ у взрослых [ADHD in adults] — https://mhcenter.ru/sdvg-u-vzroslyh

When to Consider Psychological Support for Your Child

Most parents, at some point, wonder whether something they’ve noticed in their child is just a passing phase or something worth getting support for. This article walks through how to think about that question — not a checklist of “signs,” but a way of thinking about context, duration, and impact that can help you decide on a reasonable next step. It’s educational information, not a way to diagnose your child, and it isn’t a substitute for talking to a professional about your own child’s situation.

Changes or difficulties parents may notice

Children and teenagers can show difficulty in lots of different ways — in how they feel, how they manage their emotions, or how they play, learn, speak, and act day to day. That might look like a change in mood, new or growing worries, changes in sleep, or a shift in how they’re getting on with friends or family. None of these on their own point to a particular diagnosis, and this isn’t a list to match your child against — it’s simply the kind of thing worth paying attention to.

Why context and duration matter

Many children go through periods of worry, low mood, or difficult behaviour at some stage — this is a normal part of growing up, and most of the time it resolves on its own as circumstances change or a child develops new ways of coping. What tends to be more significant is when a difficulty is a real change from how your child usually is, and when it’s severe and persistent rather than brief. A single hard week rarely means the same thing as a pattern that’s continued for weeks or months.

When difficulties begin to affect everyday life

Alongside duration, it’s worth thinking about impact: is this affecting school, friendships, family life, or your child’s ability to do things they’d usually enjoy? A difficulty that’s starting to get in the way of several areas of daily life is a more meaningful signal than a difficulty that shows up in only one narrow situation. This is less about identifying a specific problem and more about noticing when something has moved from “hard” to “getting in the way.”

You don’t need a diagnosis before asking for help

You don’t need to work out what’s going on, or arrive with the name of a condition, before it makes sense to talk to someone. The purpose of an initial conversation isn’t for you to have already diagnosed the problem — it’s to describe what you’ve noticed and get a professional view on what, if anything, might help. Raising a concern honestly is enough of a starting point.

What an initial conversation with a professional can and cannot do

A first conversation with a professional can help you describe what you’ve noticed, ask about context, duration, and impact, and help you understand what a reasonable next step looks like — including whether a fuller assessment would be useful. What it generally can’t do is deliver an instant diagnosis, guarantee a particular outcome, or tell you everything in a single short conversation. Getting an accurate picture usually takes more than one conversation, and that’s normal.

How MHC provides child & adolescent psychological support

Mental Health Center (MHC) provides psychological support for children and teenagers in Moscow, organised around age — preschool-age children, school-age children, and adolescents — using evidence-based approaches such as CBT, DBT, ACT, and schema therapy. Alongside psychological support, MHC’s English-speaking team includes options for psychiatric assessment where that’s the more appropriate next step, including for children and adolescents. If you’re not sure which is the right starting point for your child, our team can help you understand the options available rather than you needing to decide in advance.

Getting in touch is a way to ask about your options — it doesn’t commit you to anything, and it isn’t itself an assessment or a diagnosis.

Sources and further reading

CDC, About Children’s Mental Health — https://www.cdc.gov/children-mental-health/about/index.html
NHS, Every Mind Matters — Children’s mental health — https://www.nhs.uk/every-mind-matters/supporting-others/childrens-mental-health/
Mental Health Center, Детский психологический центр [Children’s Psychological Center] — https://mhcenter.ru/children-health
Mental Health Center, Ольга Титова [child & adolescent psychiatry, verified] — https://mhcenter.ru/olga-titova