From what was said on TNG, we can assume there are two kinds of personnel in Starfleet: commissioned officers, who graduated from the Academy, and enlisteds, who did not [“The Drumhead”]. Presumably there was a table of ranks for enlisted personnel, but SFAIK it was never gone into in detail.
This is, BTW, at odds with TOS, where the Writer’s Guide stated clearly that everyone on board the Enterprise was a qualified astronaut and therefore an officer, and that the “enlisted men” category did not exist.
Those are merely the background facts. The story is told within the four corners of the screen, and what we see there is makes my statement completely true. Starfleet does not follow in any strict form the structures of our modern services, so it’s futile to try to squeeze them into that form.
In one episode, I don’t remember which, she sat down opposite a troubled guest star and said in her own endearing, meddling way: “Perhaps I can help. I’m a qualified [or possibly trained] psychiatrist.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but if one is a qualified [and/or trained] psychiatrist, does that not mean he or she is a doctor of medicine? Surely she holds at least some sort of equivalent advanced degree if she’s allowed to serve as a Starfleet counselor.
Troi says she is a psychologist (not a psychiatrist) on a couple of occasions. Psychiatrists are MDs; psychologists may or may not have a Ph.D. In any case, Troi is most definitely not an MD. She is a Lt. Commander (later full Commander) in the medical division, though.
She’s not a line officer; even in the real navy your local O-4 dentist would not be expected to command a ship if the captain is killed by a tooth abscess. On TNG, Data was third-in-command after Riker, despite being only a Lt. Commander, while Dr. Crusher (a full commander for the whole series) only got the occasional nightwatch shift.
Except the time she was left in command in hostile territory with a bridge crew straight out of the Academy. :eek:
Presumably all of the senior Operations officers were either down on the planet looking for Data (who had been kidnapped by Lore’s Borg drones) or looking after the children in the nursery… :rolleyes:
In that episode it is expressly made clear that the situation is a out of the ordinary one and Crusher is ordered to do nothing but watch and get the hell away if needed.
She is also stated to be a qualified bridge officer. It makes sense that in an intersteller Navy like Starfleet, where the ship is far from help, you don’t have any deadweights around. If its standard to give medical personnel some ship driving training, I don’t see a problem with it.
In one of Clancy’s novels, an Intelligence officer ends up with the conn of an aircraft carrier in the USN. So I wonder how possible that it.
Hell, even in the modern Astronaut corps, some mission specialists are taught to fly the spacecraft (and all Russian Cosmonauts are IIRC). For example Shannon Lucid, a bio chemist was so trained.
They can; there are lots of different kinds of psychologists and they are regulated differently in each jurisdiction. Psychiatrists more commonly treat psychiatric conditions with medication and don’t typically do a lot of therapy, although some do.
Cmdr. Toland in Red Storm Rising. I am pretty sure he was a ship captain beforehand but he parked his destroyer on a sand bar and was transferred to Intel.
It’s a shame Tom Clancy is no longer with us. I want to read a book about an O-4 dentist taking over after the captain dies from a tooth abscess!
Other posters have already established that Troi is not an MD. Regardless, O’Brien had to take orders from Dax and Crusher because they outranked him, not because they were medical personnel. The only “broad power” medical staff have over officers is to forcibly relieve them of duty for medical reasons. This power isn’t something which the Star Trek writers dreamed up; it’s been standard military practice for centuries, and crops up all the time in older historical fiction. (For example, C. S. Forester’s Lieutenant Hornblower is largely about a 19th-century British navy captain with paranoid schizophrenia. Soon after setting sail he begins to act erratically, torturing the crew and jeopardizing their mission. The ship’s doctor is reluctant to exercise his legal power to declare him unfit for command but is eventually forced to act.)
Of course they do. The essential difference between them is that psychiatrists, being licensed physicians, have the authority to prescribe drugs, and psychologists don’t have that authority.
Regarding ranks and positions in Starfleet, I think it’s worth noting there is probably no real continuity between Starfleet and any Real Life military force on Earth, given the whole Eugenics Wars and WWIII kind of wiped the slate in that regard.
I get the distinct impression that Starfleet’s rank structure is based off of some DVDs of old war movies and a couple seasons of JAG which managed to survive the end of the world in the early 21st.
They have the ability to do so, sure, but the vast majority don’t. There are too few psychiatrists per patient and so they have to focus on the medicine aspects and have a psychologist or even case worker/therapist handle the rest. It’s pretty rare to find a psychiatrist who will also do psychotherapy these days.
Though, based on Troi’s encounters with Barclay, I’d say she can’t give out medicine. There were some times where an emergency medication would have been useful. Instead, she teaches some woo-ish thing called “plexing,” (which I fanwank by believing it was a placebo).
I’d say that O’Brien was a more competent chief engineer than LaForge. Unlike LaForge, he did not succumb to (or even demonstrate) the desire to experiment or research at the expense of keeping things run smoothly.
When you have a crew of seven, that makes sense. When you have a crew of over a thousand, not so much.
So long as there are experienced and qualified Operations (or even Engineering) specialists aboard, the Chief Medical Officer belongs in Sickbay, not on the bridge, especially in a dangerous tactical situation.
On TOS, the chain of command was Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and (despite revisionist attempts to prove otherwise) Sulu (not Uhura). The only time McCoy had anything remotely like a Command function was in “Court Martial,” and then only because he was the senior officer present. His only orders were to place Spock under arrest and turn the ship around to retrieve the Captain.
