I passed as well, thank goodness.
1. My main source by far was Spiegel and Kenny. I did every single question. The questions were fairly similar to the real exam and the explanations were very helpful, even more so than just doing the questions. I used an electronic format, and made study guides out of the explanations to the questions I either missed or thought were important topics (even if I got them right). This guide has very detailed explanations especially for the neurology questions, and as it turned out, far more neuro than I needed to know for the boards. If you know all the neuro that's in this book, I suspect you'll have no trouble with the neuro section of the boards. For this last exam, the passing mark was 61% correct, I got >90% and I don't even consider myself good at neuro. The neuro on the boards is pretty straightforward.
2. Unlike most others, I did not focus on the Kaufman neuro textbook. I read maybe the first few chapters and then decided there was no way I could make it through the whole book in the time I had. I admit it was a risk, but in retrospect, the textbook was not necessary given how thorough the Spiegel and Kenny text is.
3. I read some sections of the Educational Review Manual in Psychiatry 6th ed (2009), edited by K. Ranga Rama Krishnan. There are questions, but I didn't find them very helpful, in part because there were far too many errors in the answer keys; for example it'd say the answer was B when the text clearly indicated it was A or something like that. The actual text is much better.
4. I read over the Prites I'd taken during residency. This helped to nail down some key facts, but I sure didn't have time to look up the individual sources for the questions. I didn't study these too hard but I thought it was helpful to at least go over them.
I agree with Chimed that the vignettes were the worst sections. They really should be worth <50% of the exam in my opinion. You have to answer the questions in order, and there are multiple-multiple choice checkbox questions where you have to select all the right answers to get credit. I will say though that it doesn't seem like they're trying to trick you on these questions. The answers (especially on the mental status questions) seemed pretty apparent and the questions ask about major diagnoses, not weird obscure stuff like stereotypic movement disorder. Also, there's no neuro on the vignettes, they're all psych.
I'm not sure it makes a difference, but you have the chance to submit comments on many of the questions. If you feel that there is no single best answer and you have time, you may want to send comments. Who knows, the test writers may choose to throw out some questions, or accept more than one answer as occasionally happens on the Prites.
I didn't find it necessary to start preparing many months in advance, but I also took off the week before the exam to study. I studied about 8-10 hours a day for that whole time and it was much higher yield than trying to study a couple hours per evening after full days at work. Prior to that week off, I looked over my old Prites here and there but (regrettably) didn't spend much time on them or anything else boards-related.
There are 500 questions and I thought that I needed to go fairly fast to get to all of them, but I did finish the test with time to spare, and I'm not a fast reader. On all three USMLE steps I never had time to spare and I thought those exams required speed reading, while I didn't think that of the psych boards. The psych board questions are far shorter on average than USMLE questions. I did well on psych boards despite never coming close to acing any of the USMLEs, so there's hope for those of you who found the USMLEs discouraging like I did.
