Psychiatry Interviewing Skills

[prominence]

---

Members do not see this ad.

most medical students who are interested in psychiatry will complete their required third year clinical rotation in psychiatry and maybe 1 or 2 psychiatry electives.

it takes many years to be an astute interviewer as a psychiatrist. if these 2 or 3 months is the only psychiatry background most applicants have, to what level do most psych residency programs expect their first year residents to be at as far their residents' interview skills? do they assume you know squat, and teach you how to properly approach the interview, or do they expect you to be at a certain level as far as interviewing skills?

do u conduct ur own interviews independently as a psych 1st yr resident, and then report back your findings? or does a more senior resident or attending accompany you as you conduct the interview with the patient?

 

[mdblue]

Don't worry you'll do fine. Most of the people in my program initially didn't know the difference between thought and perception-they continued to put hallucinations under thought content( I guess the CCS handbook mentions it that way).
Anyway you'll get sufficient training to work on your skills-however it's doubtful whether you'll be able to use it . Most of the places nowadays use check box schedules for pt-assessment making the job easier for non-clinician intake personnels. Unfortunately new trainees seem to assume that this is an efficient way to gather pt-info and they tend to stick to the check-list approach. If you can avoid the trap you'll do fine. Also to graduate to next year you have to do observed interviews-that's a board/ACGME requirement. You'll also have supervision in senior years to work this out.
Hope this helps.

 

[prominence]

thanks mdblue. any other opinions?

 

[watto]

If you really want some hard-core practice talking with psych patients, albeit not in a therapeutic setting, volunteer at your local community crisis hotline. MAN did I learn a lot about how to navigate discussions with borderlines, paranoids, narcissists, basically every personality disorder plus a few with psychoses...great experience and from what I gather, as good a prep you can get for one-on-one patient contact outside of a rotation setting.

 

[Big Lebowski]

Don't worry. During my PGY-1 year, interview skills where a major focus of teaching by my attendings. They did not appear to have hefty expectations of "interview technique". I think they did expect some understanding of the DSM-IV TR criteria for some basic disorders so specific questions could be asked during the interview...but otherwise, the teaching was very basic initially.