Curriculum & Clinical Experience

The first year of training is designed to give the resident a sense of medical identity. It has elements of a rotating or flexible internship. The year begins for all new residents with at least one month on Psychiatry. This affords them an introduction to the service and to their psychiatric colleagues, and it also serves as a period of learning skills basic to psychiatry. The inpatient psychiatry experience is shared between the geriatric psychiatry unit at MHMMC with a significant population of med-psych patients and two months at MaineHealth Behavioral Health at Spring Harbor.

Second-year residents complete their inpatient experience at MaineHealth Behavioral Health at Spring Harbor, our 100-bed affiliate in Westbrook. There they work with general psychiatry patients, as well as spending a month on the Pediatric Psychiatry Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry Service at MaineHealth Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital. 

The patients are extremely diverse in psychopathology and socioeconomic class. Residents learn to work as members of the treatment team, utilizing the principles of focal therapy. Each resident carries approximately six patients with on-site supervision from inpatient staff psychiatrists. The second year also includes two months of neurology, one month of addiction psychiatry, and two months of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry.

Toward the middle of the second postgraduate year, residents may elect to acquire a small outpatient case load, moving toward a major outpatient focus in the third year. In the third year, brief and extended outpatient treatment becomes the focus of training. Third year residents spend a half-day per week seeing patients in Portland's community-based outpatient VA Clinic. The third year resident also has further training in outpatient child psychiatry and begins the supervised long term follow-up of at least two children and their families. During the third and fourth years of training, the resident is exposed to a broad array of special treatments including:

• Cognitive-behavioral therapy
• Mentalization-based treatment
• Group therapy
• Couples therapy
• Family therapy 
• Good psychiatric management for borderline personality disorder
• Assertive community treatment
• Family psychoeducation
• Dialectical behavior therapy
• Traditional insight-oriented psychodynamic approaches continue to be valued and taught

Finally, before graduation the resident should understand the important ethical issues in psychiatry, and their conduct should reflect adherence to high ethical standards. 

Model Schedule

We believe it is the goal of the psychiatrist to understand not only the patient's illness but the much larger context of the patient's life. This necessitates an appreciation of biological, psychological, and social factors and an interest in the patient's life story. We embrace and teach current advances in neuroscience, and we assert that learning psychotherapy is vital to residency training. We are committed to teaching residents to thrive in the evolving medical climate, and to respond to community needs. At the same time we are dedicated to maintaining our identity as medicine's most humanistic specialty.

Daniel Grant Price, MD
Residency Director

13 x 4-week blocks:

• 4 of Inpatient Family Medicine, Internal Medicine or Pediatrics (or combination)
• 2 of Med-Psych/Geri-Psych
• 1 of Inpatient Consultation and Liaison Service
• 2 of Emergency Psychiatry
• 1 of Night Float
• 1 of Inpatient Adolescent
• 1 of General Inpatient Psychiatry
• 1 of ECT/Research and Quality Improvement

Includes one day per week of protected didactic and resident meeting time (except on off-service months and during night float)

13 x 4-week blocks:

• 2 of Neurology (mix of inpatient and outpatient)
• 2 of Inpatient Consultation and Liaison service
• 1 of Pediatric Psychiatry Consultation-Liaison
• 1 of Addiction psychiatry
• 1 of a selective
• ½ block (2 weeks) of Night Float
• 5 and ½ blocks of General Inpatient, at least one of which are done in the rural setting

Includes one day per week of protected didactic and resident meeting time (except during night float) 

• Full year of rural, outpatient work, which includes both psychopharmacologic treatment and psychotherapy of patients of all ages (child/adolescent, adult, geriatric)
• Includes one day per week of protected didactic and resident meeting time

• At least 9 blocks of rural, outpatient work, which includes both psychopharmacologic treatment and psychotherapy of patients of all ages (child/adolescent, adult, geriatric)
• 4 blocks of elective time, which can be in inpatient, outpatient, or substance use treatment, but must be spent in the rural setting
• Includes one day per week of protected didactic and resident meeting time