With regard to IU students going into Psych, the number is up considerably this year and most of them will make great psychiatrists (smart, motivated, mature med students). I know that at least 3 want to stay at IU for training, which will be a boon for the program.
With regard to the training, I absolutely love (not in that sense) the chair of the department. He is an excellent clinician, great researcher, and an even better advocate for the careers of his trainees. My interest is research, and I have seen how he does everything in his power to make sure that someone who wants to do research can get the time and financial resources to do what they want. The clinical training is pretty strong and the patient population is very diverse (as you saw). The training in child and adolescent psych during the adult residency is very strong as well. The one downside is that psychotherapy is less emphasized, but this was not different from a lot of other programs that I looked at. Certainly a resident can get as much psychotherapy training as they want, just will need to seek it out.
The teaching faculty is getting better every year, as a result of the chair bringing all his friends and former trainees from Yale to the program. The chair has an ungodly amount of money at his disposal to use for faculty recruitment and retention, so I expect that even more great people will be hired in the next year or two. The other clear advantage that I saw for this program compared to others that I interviewed at was that every attending that a resident worked with was a faculty member of the department and in the past 3-4 years there has been a significant purging of the bad attendings from the inpatient services (even at the VA, no less). Finally, there is a neuro/psych double board program and those residents are very strong.
With respect to the Fellowships, Child is very strong and Gero is very strong. I imagine that in the next 2-3 years they will have a strong Forensics program.
Finally, lifestyle points that are advantages - 1) no weekends unless on call, 2) awesome support staff in the ER (will let you get some sleep if they can), 3) humane call schedule and no call after PGY2, 4) lots of opportunities for easy moonlighting money.
If I didn't want to leave the state for family reasons (both my and my spouse's families are in the northeast), I would be very happy staying at IU.
Hope this helps, feel free to send any additional questions my way. I would encourage you to let the PD know if you are still interested in the program. They have a policy of not letting people know if they are ranking them highly, so don't be turned off by that.
MBK 2003
