The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston

General Psychiatry Residency Program

The training curriculum is geared around the overall educational objective of teaching residents the fundamentals of acute long-term treatment, and follow-up care.

Overview

The Residency Training Program in General Psychiatry of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences offers a four-year training programs. The Program is geared around the overall training objective of teaching residents the fundamentals of acute and long-term treatment of psychiatric patients. The Program offers training in the biological, psychological and socio-cultural aspects of psychiatry and strives to prepare residents for successful careers that emphasize clinical practice, scholarship, teaching and research.

The General Psychiatry Residency Training Program, which began in 1974, received its most recent five year renewal of full accreditation by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education in 2000. It has a number of facilities, but the inpatient psychiatric work is done at the Harris County Psychiatric Center, a 190 bed psychiatric facility which opened in 1986. The hospital now has 5,000 admissions yearly.

The General Residency Training Program is designed to offer the resident a comprehensive exposure to many facets of contemporary psychiatric practice. Rotations include treatment experience with patients ranging from children to the elderly. All residents rotate on services devoted to the assessment and management of patients with acute psychotic states of both toxic-organic and functional etiology, patients with forensic problems, patients with longer-term relapsing major psychiatric disorders, and patients requiring psychotherapy. Experience in consultation psychiatry on medical/surgical units is a part of the training experience.

There is an extensive four-year series of seminars covering all major areas of psychiatry. The series is different for each year of the program and is not given to all four years as a group. The topics include childhood disorders, geriatrics, neuropsychiatry, psychopharmacology, addiction medicine, developmental disorders, neuroscience, affective disorders, anxiety and compulsive disorders, original thinkers in psychiatry, community psychiatry, cross cultural psychiatry and forensic psychiatry.

Since the start of The University of Texas-Houston General Residency Training Program in Psychiatry, the rule has been that the residents were not to be over-worked and not to be exhausted. It is expected that the residents have ample supervision, to make sure that this exposure is an educational and not just a service program.

From its inception, the training program worked on the idea that, within a given PG year group and across the PG years, collegiality was to be supportive, not competitive. The residents are encouraged to help all of their colleagues do the best they can.

The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences has always had an open door policy for residents to have access to faculty in addition to their assigned supervisors and attendings. These traits - faculty accessibility and attention to supervision of residents - have been stressed since the start of the program.

Graduates from the training program are highly sought after by fellowships, academic departments, employers, and colleagues nation-wide. An outstanding success rate on the ABPN examinations attests to the success of the training mission. UTHSC-trained psychiatrists are regional, national, and international leaders in patient care, administration, education, and research.

The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Mental Sciences Institute
1300 Moursund St., Room 267
Houston, TX 77030
713-500-2570 (phone)
713-500-2565 (fax)
msi.restrain@uth.tmc.edu