This is the most exciting and challenging time to enter psychiatry in our history. We can help our patients more effectively than ever before, and research is expanding our diagnostic and therapeutic knowledge at an astounding rate. Psychopharmacology may well represent the fastest growing and potentially most bewildering discipline in psychiatry. We emphasize synthesis rather than compartmentalization of diverse treatment modalities, and we conceptualize psychiatric disorders as evolving from a complex interplay between neurobiologic, developmental and psychosocial influences.
Psychiatrists are also leaders in the development and practice of psychotherapies.
We are committed to teaching our residents basic expertise in these interventions. Our faculty features several internationally prominent psychoanalysts. We also have substantial expertise in cognitive-behavioral, family, group and brief psychotherapies, and include training in them. As medicine increasingly recognizes behavioral and psychosocial issues in, for example, the etiology of hypertension and in the aggravation of most illnesses by stress, our collaboration with our general medical colleagues is increasing. Consultation and liaison psychiatry, neurology, pain management, substance abuse, stress management and geriatric psychiatry are but a few of the areas in which such consultation and collaboration figure importantly.