Description
This course focuses primarily on basic psychopathology including diagnostic criteria and treatments. It is a required course during the second year of medical school at MUSC and is only offered during the spring semester. The course director teaches most of the classes although guest lecturers provide a few of the lectures. The course is offered as part of the doctoring curriculum. Course Content
The emphasis in this course will be on the most commonly encountered psychiatric disorders. The approach follows that of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition. The phenomenology of the mental disorders will be stressed, though information regarding etiology, epidemiology, and treatment will be included and you will be responsible for this. Course Format
The syllabus contains several parts to allow you to learn the information. The first section includes all the lecture slides in Power Point handout form. The next section includes a series of case vignettes with diagnoses and discussion of the elements of the case. You should read these cases in conjunction with the textbook readings and lectures. These cases will amplify the information about the illnesses and prove helpful for the exam. The last section includes the DSM-IV criteria for the major mental disorders. These are for reference and need not be memorized. For each lecture, your syllabus provides the Power Point handouts of the slides. Lectures will stress clinical presentations and include video clips when possible. The text covers each of the topics. Readings are obvious: the chapter in the book corresponds with the lecture topics. Only the lecture on dementia is not covered in the text. This text will be useful when you begin clinical rotations.
Lectures - Patient Interview (lecture) - 2 hrs
- Mental Status Exam (live patient interview)/Small Groups – 2 hrs
- Substance Related Disorders - 2 hrs
- Personality Disorders - 2 hrs
- Anxiety Disorders - 1 hr
- Eating Disorders - 1 hr
- Mood Disorders - 2 hrs
- Somatoform Disorders - 1 hr
- Dementia/Delirium - 1 hr
- Childhood Disorders - 2 hrs
- Psychotic Disorders/Schizophrenia - 1 hr
- Sexual Disorders - 1 hr
There will be one 2-hour small group meeting. The meeting sites will be distributed before the small group. This meeting is a required part of the course and is meant to reinforce the information from the mental status exam lecture. The class will begin with a patient interview in front of the entire class. You will be asked to write the mental status exam following the interview, and then you will discuss your writing and thinking with a preceptor in a small group following the interview. Required Text
Test questions will be based on the lectures and the text. The required reading assignments correlate with the lecture topics. The text is a small paperback, Saint-Frances Guide to Psychiatry by M. McCarthy and M. O’Malley, Lippincott Williams and Wilkens, 2001. This book is available through the bookstore. You may additionally find the pocket version of the DSM IV useful.
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