Primary Care Mental Health Curriculum

Abstract

Abstract Primary care providers are often poor at identifying and treating common mental health disorders. One reason why has to do with inadequate training during residency. Our objective with this resource was to create a mental health consult clinic in the primary care setting that would teach internal medicine residents how to diagnose and manage common mental health disorders. This resource includes components of our mental health curriculum that can be used as a model for resident education in other primary care settings. Included is a flowchart describing how one might structure a primary care mental health consult clinic, as well as adjunctive problem-based learning cases, a resident guide and accompanying faculty guide, and a table summarizing antidepressant side effects for use in strategizing on how to choose antidepressants. Survey responses of residents who completed the intervention, compared to those of residents who did not receive additional training, indicate that residents who did complete it had a higher mean-percentage score for knowledge of affective disorders and were more confident their ability to treat depression and generalized anxiety disorder. The preliminary results of our survey suggest that such a curriculum successfully increases both residents' confidence in treating depression and generalized anxiety disorders and their knowledge of the management of affective disorders.

Keywords

• Depression
• Antidepressant Side-effects
• Mood Disorder Questionnaire
• Anxiety Disorders