Fall, Winter, and Spring Sessions. Four- to Eight-Week Session

Course Coordinator:
Carlos Zarate, MD

Course Description
This is an advanced four- to eight-week elective in the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) open only to students who will have completed their initial rotation/clerkship in psychiatry before arriving at NIH.

A wide variety of psychiatric and neuropsychiatric disorders are studied at the Clinical Center. Patients with unipolar and bipolar affective disorder and with schizophrenia are admitted to the inpatient program. Outpatient studies include patients with affective disorders, schizophrenia, panic-anxiety syndromes, endocrine-related mood disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Child psychiatry studies are covered in the Pediatric Psychopharmacology clinical elective (see separate description).

Our course emphasizes an understanding of current integrated research approaches to the biologic mechanisms involved in psychiatric illness. Approaches include:

• The importance of clinical phenomenology, family history assessment, and neuropsychiatric evaluation.
• The use of brain imaging techniques to study central nervous system (CNS) structure and function.
• Neuroendocrine, neurophysiologic, and pharmacologic studies.
• Non-pharmacologic, such as sleep deprivation and photo therapy.
• The use of investigational and noninvestigational therapeutic drugs.

Each student will join a senior investigator who will serve as the student's preceptor. Students may also work with clinical associates or other staff on one of the clinical research units. An individually based tutorial program emphasizing research approaches to one disorder, one group of drugs, or one aspect of drug effect evaluation will be planned with the student. Students will perform psychiatric and neurologic evaluation on assigned patients and will participate in regular clinical research unit meetings, rounds, and seminars.

Staff

• Jose Apud, MD
• Wayne Drevets, MD
• Robert Innis, MD
• Allan Mallinger, MD
• Dennis Murphy, MD
• Daniel Weinberger, MD

For additional information, see the NIMH website.