Didactic Learning
Each year, residents will examine and interact with issues at the intersection of society, culture, and identity. These didactics build on one another conceptually, so that residents can experience the intricacies of these issues while feeling empowered to collaborate in making a more just and equitable community.
Across their four years of training, residents will participate in didactics that explore the following topics:
Culture
Sessions in this category establish and reinforce the importance of the multifaceted narratives and interwoven histories that influence illness and wellness while striving to achieve the best possible healthcare outcomes. Residents will discuss concepts including culture as a multidimensional construct, culture and bias within the hospital, individual and cultural identities, global psychiatric epidemiology, spirituality, DSM cultural formulation, and many other topics. Residents are given the opportunity to address bias at the bedside in the hospital through interactive demonstrations and didactics and are also invited to participate in case-based cultural learning.
Society
In these sessions, residents will be exposed to topics that address the interplay between communities in the creation of a larger society. Presentations on social determinants of psychiatric illness, ethics, structural competency, community prevention, the history of mistakes and paradigm shifts in psychiatry, US mental healthcare, justice, minority stress and intersectionality, trauma in marginalized populations, community mental health models, and advocacy, among others, are covered.
Identity
Residents explore how issues surrounding identity affect the therapeutic relationship and the administration of healthcare in lectures from this series. They will build on understanding and confronting privilege, recovery and risk, overidentification in the psychiatric encounter, lived experience, and topics of sexual and gender identity.
The sociocultural content team that develops and modifies these didactics is comprised of both faculty and residents, thereby enabling rapid identification and implementation of changes and updates in response to evolving resident and community interests and needs. Residents are appreciative of both the concrete topic content presented through lectures as well as the opportunity to engage in exploratory conversations during these seminars.
Further, residents will have access to the Grand Rounds series at Mass General Brigham hospitals. Recent sociocultural topics have included addressing mental health disparities, facilitating inclusive multicultural therapy groups, gender differences in substance use treatment, achieving population health through a Learning Health Community, and many others.