Enhancement Modules

Students will spend half days in one or more of the following sites:

• Primary Care clinic: Provide integrated medical and psychiatric care to county patients under supervision of a dual-trained family medicine-psychiatry attending.
• Crisis Center:  Provide acute care in an acute setting with particular emphasis on distinguishing medical and psychiatric etiologies of distress. Students will be supervised by a dual-trained internal medicine/psychiatry attending.
• Inpatient Psychiatry:  This must be done in conjunction with the inpatient psychiatry core experience.  Students will work in an inpatient psychiatry team led by a dual-trained family medicine/psychiatry attending. They will work with faculty and residents to provide primary and psychiatric care to psychiatric inpatients.
• Internal Medicine Clinic:  Students will work with a psychosomatic medicine psychiatrist in evaluating and treating mentally ill patients in an outpatient primary care clinic.

Students will participate in two or more of the following psychotherapy groups:

• Medication support
• Culture-specific groups for Hmong and Spanish-speaking communities
• Dialectical behavior therapy
• Cognitive behavior therapy targeting panic disorder
• Psychoeducational groups for depressive disorders, anxiety disorders and bipolar spectrum disorders

Students will spend at least half day providing mental health care to children at one or more of the following sites:

• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Service (CAPS):  A community mental health clinic serving economically disadvantaged children and adolescents.
• MIND Institute:  State-of-the-art clinic in which a multidisciplinary team of psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists and pediatricians specialize in the evaluation and treatment of children with pervasive developmental disorders

In addition to gaining experience working with Sacramento’s diverse community through the core elective experiences, students may elect to learn how to effectively utilize the DSM-IV cultural formulation and participate in an innovative Hmong Medication Support Group with faculty who have expertise in cross-cultural issues.

Students will work with a multidisciplinary team at Sacramento County’s Mental Health Crisis Unit at least one half day.  The experience emphasizes psychiatric assessment,  management of psychiatric emergencies and psychiatric triage.