Welcome to the Penn State University / Hershey Medical Center Adult Psychiatry Residency Program

The least we can say is that we are a fully accredited four-year Adult Psychiatry Residency Training Program operating since 1972. However, for us, meeting all the requirements of the ACGME is not the end goal but only the starting point for resident training. We regularly debate and discuss ideas to improve the training and educational experiences and come up with strategies to implement them in an effective manner so that it becomes a routine part of the residency experience.

Residents’ feedback and participation is an important part of this process. For example, our orientation module for new PGY-I’s is designed and implemented with the help of current residents who are in the best position to identify and address any details that were missing in their own orientations.

Thursday mornings from 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM every week is protected didactic time for all residents. Besides this, didactics are part of every major rotation, and the didactic series for the Inpatient and Outpatient rotations are structured to compliment the Thursday general educational experience. Topics covered in each rotation are relevant to clinical experiences on the service. We put significant effort into utilizing the most appropriate resources for teaching, from not only full-time faculty but also adjunct and clinical faculty for their respective areas of expertise in Psychiatry. It is needless to state (although I will) that patient care by residents is supervised by faculty on every clinical rotation.

Besides psychopharmacology we have a strong psychotherapy training program which includes psychodynamic psychotherapy among other modalities. By the end of training residents are expected to have the skills to either practice psychodynamic psychotherapy or to refer appropriately for therapy, including as part of their psychodynamic formulation the rationale for the recommendation for a specific type of therapy for a particular patient.