Tú y Yo: La psicopatología emerge entre nosotros

Abstract

Background: The formation of a professional to become competent in a discipline requires performing those distinctions by which objects of knowledge typical of a profession emerge. For Psychiatry these objects are the psychiatric symptoms that arise and are distinguished during mental examination. The purpose of this paper is to explore practical training in mental examination and to analyze how the experiences of interviewing a patient become organized and significant events for students through teaching practices. Material and Methods: During an academic year different teaching practices were observed in a University Department of Psychiatry, including lectures, notes, canonical books, and video recording and analysis of different training activities. Results: Excerpts from transcripts of individual interviews with teachers and students are presented, and teacher-student sequences from different training activities. Discussion: During mental examination professors require explicitly "to describe" and not "to interpret" but then they require "interpret" without clarifying when to do one thing or another. However, what teachers actually do implicitly is: 1) to let students experience the interaction with the patient; 2) to help students get an affective distance from and to observe their own experience; 3) to call the experience with a specific word (psychiatric symptom) and 4) to deny all the aforementioned process, whereby a psychiatric symptom arises as if it were an object in a space of sensory perception. This process is actively denied and is partially out of awareness of teachers and students.