Across varied settings for training, our residency highlights specific training objectives that prepare our graduates for successful and rewarding careers during the coming decades. These training objectives are embedded within a broad base of biopsychosocial therapeutics that each resident learns. They define a special character of our training program:

 

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Learning Psychopharmacological Skills
for Treating Complex and Treatment-Resistant Disorders

Psychiatric practices are becoming increasingly dominated by patients with psychiatric disorders complicated by other medical illnesses and with patients who have failed prior efforts by non-psychiatric clinicians to treat their symptoms. Such cases require sophisticated expertise in psychopharmacology that is well integrated with a medical understanding of the patient. Our psychopharmacological lectures and clinical supervision are designed to teach residents how to diagnose and treat these complex cases. Our consultation-liaison psychiatry curriculum provides expertise in treating combined medical and psychiatric disorders in both inpatient and outpatient settings.

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Learning Psychotherapy Skills for
Time-Sensitive Psychotherapy

Future psychiatrists must be skilled in time-sensitive methods that enable specific treatment goals to be achieved within the limits of a patient's financial resources, while still understanding the complexity of his or humanity. Our residency training provides graduated training in each residency year in psychotherapies (interpersonal, cognitive-behavioral, group, couple, and family therapies) that are usable in brief therapy, while continuing to provide intensive training in the psychotherapy of long-term patients while still understanding the complexity of his or her humanity.

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Learning Skills for Treating Patients within
Long-Term Therapeutic Relationships

Some patients, for certain problems, are not best treated within brief, time-limited therapies. Other patients elect to undertake long-term psychotherapy in order to achieve changes in chronic patterns of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are considered maladaptive. A psychiatrist must understand how long-term treatment relationships differ from time-limited therapies and must be able to utilize these aspects therapeutically. Drawing from an eminent clinical faculty of psychodynamic psychotherapists, our program maintains a strong commitment to training residents in the skills needed for long-term therapies.

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Gaining Cultural Competence as a Psychiatrist

As America becomes ethnically and culturally more diverse as a nation, it is vital that psychiatrists learn to operate effectively among different cultural and language communities. Located downtown near the seat of the national government, George Washington University Medical Center draws patients across the entire socioeconomic spectrum and from a broad range of ethnicities and nationalities. Our residents train in five additional community sites in the Washington metropolitan area, among them the Center for Multicultural Human Services in Fairfax County, which offers immigrants and refugees mental health programs in 27 different languages. A nationally prominent faculty provides didactic teaching in cross-cultural and international psychiatry.

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Learning a Developmental Perspective
for Guiding Psychiatric Treatment

A unifying theme reflected in the content of training is the appreciation of human development throughout the life span. New research has delineated with increasing clarity the relationships between genetic risk and gene expression. Residents learn how interactions of risk and protective factors lead to onset of psychiatric illness in young children, and how these symptoms often can be diminished in later life by an integration of psychopharmacology with cognitive, family, and social network therapies.

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Gaining Skills Needed for Psychiatric Competence
in Primary Care Settings

In systems of managed healthcare, primary care physicians, family physicians, general internists, and pediatricians are frequently the front-line clinicians for treating such common psychiatric disorders as major depression and panic disorder. Psychiatrists must know how to collaborate effectively in a liaison role as consultants for these clinicians. This entails not only mastery of consultation skills, but also learning how symptom patterns and treatment methods differ in a primary care setting from those in a specialist referral setting. Such consultation-liaison and primary care psychiatry skills are emphasized in our program. The George Washington University Health Plan provides a large primary care patient population with whom our residents train.

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Learning the Neurology of Cognition, Behavior, and Emotion

As neuroscience provides better understandings of brain functioning, new psychiatric syndromes can be defined and old psychiatric syndromes are understood in new ways. In order to treat these emerging disorders, psychiatrists must understand the anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology of the nervous system, as well as specific therapies for disorders at the interface of neurology and psychiatry. The neuropsychiatry curriculum in our program provides didactic instruction as well as focused clinical experience in treating neuropsychiatric disorders.

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Acquiring Skills Needed for Organizational
and Group Leadership

Whereas psychiatrists of past generations largely worked as solo practitioners, psychiatrists of the future more commonly will work on multi-disciplinary treatment teams. These psychiatrists must have mastered the interpersonal and organizational skills needed to facilitate the unique contributions of each team member to a coherent and unified plan of treatment. Our program teaches residents how to work collaboratively with other professionals, through clinical experiences on interdisciplinary treatment teams in both inpatient and outpatient settings.

 

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