The Psychiatric Training of Medical Students

Abstract

Undergraduate psychiatric education should be concerned mostly with those aspects of psychiatry required for the proper practice of medicine. Psychiatric concepts and techniques are applicable to all medical practice and relevant to the daily work of every physician or surgeon. Therefore, in the psychiatric training of medical students the focus should be primarily on teaching "psychiatry of medical practice" and much less on teaching "specialty psychiatry." The teaching of psychiatry for medical practice will be best accomplished by selecting patients who are more like those the student will see later on as a practising physician. A systematic effort should be made to develop joint teaching with other departments, if we are to hope that students will carry over the approach we teach them to other subjects of medicine. Counselling and psychotherapy are essential skills for every physician or surgeon; medical students should be taught these skills by psychiatrists who are not just skilled psychotherapists but are also comfortable in their role as physicians in view of the importance of this role for the development of the identity of the medical student as a physician. The quality of the psychiatric training of medical students is dependent to a large extent on the priority accorded to undergraduate teaching by the department of psychiatry; competing activities, however, can result in undergraduate teaching being given less than top priority. Long-standing difficulties which psychiatry and psychiatrists experience in the medical school may impede undergraduate psychiatric education; these difficulties can be lessened by the closer involvement of psychiatrists with other physicians in the clinical and educational programs.

Objectives for the undergraduate teaching of psychiatry: survey of doctors and students

“…This teaching must satisfy two complementary educational requirements: first, it has to provide basic psychiatric knowledge for medical students in general and secondly, it has to provide a sound psychiatric background for those students who will be specializing in psychiatry. Numerous authors have stressed the necessity of teaching directed towards medical practice and have set out the objectives of psychiatric training for all medical students 1 –3 , while others have put forward more specific models 4 .…”

How is Psychiatry Taught to Australian and New Zealand Medical Students?

“…Whether departments of psychiatry use this increased time to best advantage remains open to question. Ney and Jones [2] asserted that teaching allocations had as much to do with academic imperialism as with students’ perceived needs, and Vioneskos [1] expressed concern that the patients encountered by students in most university teaching hospitals had little in common with those they would care for later in their careers.…”

Beyond the Chalkboard: The Interacting Domains in Undergraduate Psychiatric Teaching

“…The selection of patients in the teaching environment should, however, focus on patients whom the student will meet to in his clinical practice; this should be the ‘psychiatry of medical practice’ rather than ‘specialty psychiatric practice'practice’. [16]…”