Academic psychiatry : the journal of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training and the Association for Academic Psychiatry
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Clinical and neurobiological data suggest that psychiatric disorders, as traditionally defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), are (1) more comorbid than expected by chance, (2) often share neurobiological signatures, and (3) reflect alterations across multiple brain systems that mediate particular mental processes. As such, emerging conceptualizations such at the National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria Project (RDoC) have suggested that a different way to understand psychopathology may be with respect to the degree of dysfunction in each of these brain systems, seen dimensionally, which both cross traditional diagnostic boundaries and extend to a healthy range of functioning. At present, however, this scientific perspective has not been incorporated into neuroscience education in psychiatry, nor has its relationship to clinical care been made clear. ⋯ This "proof of concept" neuroscience course illustrates a potential route for bridging between rapid advances in psychiatric neuroscience and the clinical education for trainees not otherwise versed in neuroscience but who are needed for scientific advances to translate to the clinic. The promise of this approach may be in part related to the similarity between this framework and problem-based approaches common in routine clinical care. In such approaches, clinicians focus on the expressed complaints of their individual patient and identify specific symptoms as the target of treatment--symptoms which are presumably the expression of dysfunction in specific brain systems.
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The author focuses on a new rapidly spreading practice of publication in open-access journals. The pros and cons of open-access journals are discussed. Publishing in these journals may be cost prohibitive for educators and junior faculty members. ⋯ The readership may be flooded with a large number of low-quality articles (maybe not even properly peer-reviewed) from open-access journals. It may take some time to sort out what is and what is not relevant and useful. Open-access publishing represents a problematic and controversial practice and may be associated with a conflict of interest for the editors and publishers of these journals.
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The National Institute of Mental Health seeks to address the gap between modern neuroscience and psychiatric training. The authors describe a two-pronged approach: first, to identify and support trainees in clinical neuroscience and second, to promote neuroscience literacy in psychiatric residency programs.
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Residents are one of the prime sources of information and education for medical students. As an initial step in supporting residents as teachers, a baseline self-assessment of residents' knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values related to teaching was conducted among psychiatry and family medicine residents to compare and improve their confidence and skills as teachers. ⋯ Results indicate that residents' knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values regarding teaching varies across institutions and training programs. The psychiatry residents in this study do not clearly understand their role as educators with patients and medical students; they have a less clear understanding of teaching techniques, and report spending less time educating patients than do family medicine residents. The differences might be due to different patient populations and treatment settings. The study suggests that psychiatry residents may have difficulty adapting the One-Minute Preceptor technique in psychiatric settings. Results serve as a benchmarking study in a performance-improvement program to enhance psychiatry residents' teaching skills.