The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas has a decades long commitment to producing the best possible scholarship in all areas of medicine and bringing that to bear on the training of top flight, evidence oriented clinicians and the provision of outstanding clinical care to patients. The Department of Psychiatry happily shares these values and commitments.
We implement this commitment in our General Psychiatry Training Program by integrating outstanding basic and clinical researchers with excellent clinicians in all areas of psychiatry to provide residents with state of the art knowledge and clinical experiences. We strive to graduate our residents at the cutting edge of all of psychiatry.
UTSouthwestern’s residents are exposed to a wide variety of systems of psychiatric care and patient populations. Affiliates include a private general hospital (Presbyterian), the widely acknowledged best-run county hospital in the country (Parkland), a private university hospital (Zale Lipshy), three university student health centers, a VA hospital, a private tertiary care pediatric hospital (Children' s Medical Center), the local community mental health center and school based clinics. The program involves every resident in each setting in a coherent plan. Diversity of settings allows the resident to care for the widest possible range of patients by diagnosis, by ethnic background, by socio-economic status, and by locality.
Excellence in All Areas of Psychiatry
With 130 full time faculty and 140 voluntary faculty, we have expertise in virtually all areas pertinent to modern psychiatric practice. Whether it's psychoanalysts (all 43 in Dallas are on our faculty) or basic scientists (18) or any area in between, you will find an expert committed to teaching about his or her field of interest. This includes areas rarely found in psychiatry departments, such as health economics, family systems studies, psychotherapy research, neurogenesis, and psychoneuroendocrinology. Not only is our faculty diverse as a whole, but we also take special joy in collaborating across interest areas. The Department's ethos is reflected in such papers as "Should Psychotherapy be Considered a Biological Treatment"
The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center's Department of Psychiatry is one of only 15 programs nationwide that offers ACGME accredited advanced fellowships in all core psychiatric subspecialties. It is the only program in the southern half of the country to do so. This means a large number of board certified fulltime faculty in each area: 5 in Addiction Psychiatry, 10 in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, two in Forensic Psychiatry, 10 in Geriatric Psychiatry, and 3 in Sleep Medicine. All are heavily involved in teaching in the general program as well as the fellowships.
Education at the Cutting Edge - Evidence Based Psychiatry
UT Southwestern's Department of Psychiatry is committed to graduating residents at the cutting edge of every aspect of psychiatry. This involves exposure not only to experienced, practicing clinician/educators, but also the opportunity to learn from outstanding researcher/educators who know and are in the process of producing the latest in evidence based psychiatry. In our opinion there is often a misconception about the role of research in contributing to the excellence of a program. We view the presence and involvement of internationally recognized researchers as central to providing our residents with the latest, most advanced evidence based clinical tools, to preparing them to administer treatments yet to come. Programs that do not have such resources often portray the presence of extensive research programs as separate from, perhaps as even a distraction from clinical education. To us, the opposite is the case.
The department's exciting research programs in psychotherapy research, the molecular genetics of addictions, imaging in schizophrenia, the neurobiology of attention, family therapy, the efficacy of algorhythms in clinical decision making, dopamine in brains of schizophrenia and alzheimer's, ECT and MST in treatment resistant mood disorder, the neurobiology of genetic vulnerability to stress, adjunctive treatments for depression, neuronal signal transduction processes, sleep and arousal mechanisms provide expert teaching for the next generation's understanding of psychiatric disorders. In addition, our extensive clinical research programs in medication trials, psychotherapy trials, medication algorithms, treatment resistance in mood disorders, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, pain management, neuropsychology, and schizophrenia and alzheimer's expose the residents to the next generation of treatments in all areas for all disorders. The most exciting area in psychiatry is in the translational research between the basic sciences and the clinical domains. Our department's work in the neuroendocrinology of mood, brain imaging of addictive disorders, the neurobiology of sleep and appetite, and the cognitive neuroscience of stress produces a picture of disorders and treatments that spans psychiatry's disparate domains.
Breadth of Exposure
Southwestern graduates are prepared to go in any direction they choose, having been exposed in depth, with appreciative understanding, to every area within psychiatry. In recent years residents have gone on to basic or clinical research careers, psychoanalytic training, private practice, academic appointments all over the country, and public psychiatry. On average, 60% of graduates each year have taken advanced fellowships locally or throughout the nation. In the last decade 87% percent of our graduates have passed both parts of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology examinations on their first attempt.
