Thursday, January 22, 2015

Psy-feld class brings psychiatry training to a new low

 
NJ.com
"It’s 9 a.m. on a Tuesday morning at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and 10 medical students sit around a conference table covered by coffee cups and clipboards. Preparing to start their morning rounds, the students chat about what they watched on television the night before.
“Jerry’s girlfriend doesn’t like George,” third-year student Marlene Wang says, referring to the iconic 1990s sitcom "Seinfeld." “And he just couldn’t live with the idea of this person not liking him.”
This isn’t a discussion about nothing. More than 15 years after the final episode, "Seinfeld" is the basis for “Psy-feld,” a teaching tool designed to help medical students identify and discuss psychiatric disorders."

Personally, I find this horrifying. This is training in psychopathology, I suppose, but for bright high school juniors -- not psychiatry residents. I wonder if part of the reason for this approach is that most of the psychiatry residents are foreign born? Watching American sit-coms might help them learn some idioms. But when they practice, all they are going to do is diagnose you as "bipolar," give you (oddly) an antidepressant, and when that doesn't work, add an antipsychotic. If they like you, they'll give you Xanax, too. Oh, and ADHD meds for the kiddies.








2 comments:

  1. Rutgers. Good school.

    That show did have the occasional good joke about foreign doctors though. Doubt they will get that idiom, if even presented.

    I say, go heavy on the protein, much B-complex, D, and magnesium, you'll be fine.
    Stay the hell out of NJ too, it sucks, and is full of biohazards of all sorts.

    ReplyDelete
  2. As the Scarlet Pimpernel would say:


    I am so fatigued by the cure...


    https://archive.org/details/TheScarletPimpernel

    ReplyDelete

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