Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Residency Program

The Medical College of Georgia Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Residency Program is a comprehensive, integrated training program fully accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) since its inception in 1983. Our goal is to recruit highly motivated aspiring child and adolescent psychiatrists who are interested in the various potentials for the practice and leadership in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry. The program creates a learning environment that promotes a developmental approach to the comprehensive assessment, diagnosis and evidence based treatment of the full scope of child, adolescent and family psychopathology, integrating a knowledge of typical development across the life cycle with an appreciation of the interactive effects of the child and the family.

The program endeavors to assimilate neuro- and social sciences as they apply to child and adolescent psychiatry to assure the graduating child and adolescent psychiatry resident the expertise needed to function in any of the major areas of the discipline (academic, community based, military-government, private practice or research settings) as a leader of and collaborator with multidisciplinary teams across a variety of settings. Finally this program is fortunate to sit in a medical system nationally known for its focus on patient and family centered care in pediatrics and the implementation of the recovery model in general psychiatry, thus making the child and adolescent psychiatry program one of the premier programs for exposure to training which integrates these models into the every day practice of the discipline.

The specific goals of the child and adolescent psychiatry training include attaining the ability to:

• comprehensively evaluate children and adolescents and their families for psychiatric disorders and to develop and implement evidence based comprehensive treatment plans for these disorders

• provide appropriate treatment modalities for children and adolescents with psychiatrics disorders, including a variety of individual brief and long-term psychotherapies, group and family therapy and complex psychopharmacology

• provide consultation and liaison services to a variety of other professionals in other settings such as pediatric hospitals, community settings, schools, social agencies, the legal system and other agencies that serve children and families

• critically assess the medical and psychological literature in an ongoing practice of lifelong learning to continually provide state-of-the-art psychiatric care

• integrate patient and family centered and recovery model practice approaches into the practice of child and adolescent psychiatry