Intern psychotherapy training?

[Doctor Bagel]

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So I'm working on a project and am trying to figure out what intern psychotherapy training looks like out there in the rest of the world. Here we spend 3 months on interviewing and 3 months of "supportive psychotherapy," which was really more of a very general introduction of concepts of psychotherapy in general. What do you guys do? Do you like it? Any thoughts about what interns should be learning?

 

[vistaril]

I dont think interns should learn any of this....

 

[nitemagi]

That reflects my intern training as well, though more like full year of practice interviewing, learning some basic concepts, practice interviews in a group with supervisors plus some individual supervision, which really serves all clinical interactions including pure medication evals.

 

[shan564]

That's more training than most of the places where I've interviewed, but I'm mostly interviewing at biologically/medically-focused programs. In general, I expect some didactics in PGY1 with real therapy experience wherever it's relevant during the inpatient psych rotations. Proper therapy training usually starts in PGY2 or 3. But again, I'm not really interviewing at many of the therapy-focused programs.

 

[twright]

We had didactics on interviewing and supportive psychotherapy (as well as the usual intern curricular material) but did not have longitudinal cases assigned to us.

I am of the mind that interns should not have longitudinal therapy cases. Many of the patients assigned to 'just' supportive therapy are there precisely because they are too psychiatrically disturbed to tolerate any other potentially more anxiety-provoking therapies. Most interns are still trying to develop their ability to do the sick/not-sick thing and should not be expected to know when they need to walk an acutely psychiatrically ill outpatient down to the ED.

 

[hamstergang]

I get only an occasional didactic called "intro to psychotherapy" in both 1st and 2nd year (well, at least until sometime near the end of 2nd year). Don't know if that's good or bad though.

 

[WhoisJohnGalt]

We have roughly the same, only our supportive psychotherapy didactic is AMAZING and absolutely can't-miss. So probably somewhat dependent on the teacher.