Hey Hey,
My name is Paul Nestadt, and it is my honor to have been selected as the PsychSIGN National Chair for 2010-2011. I am incredibly excited about the upcoming year!
First, I would like to introduce the newly elected executive board. Their names and contact information are listed below. If you have not already received an email from your regional chair, you should be hearing from her/him shortly.
National Chair: Paul Nestadt, New York Medical College, psychsign@gmail.com
Facilitator: Lara Cox, University of Pittsburgh, psychsignf@gmail.com
Region 1: Matthew Singleton, Yale University, psychsignr1@gmail.com
Region 2: Demitris Haldeos, SUNY Stonybrook, & Paul Nestadt, New York Medical College, psychsignr2@gmail.com
Region 3: Frank Fetterolf, Commonwealth Medical College, psychsignr3@gmail.com
Region 4: Rina Crawford, Northwestern University, & Jill Welte, University of Missouri, psychsignr4@gmail.com
Region 5: Stephanie Barnes, University of Puerto Rico, & Nathan Cleveland, Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine, psychsignr5@gmail.com
Region 6: Eric Tung, Western University of Health Sciences, & Steven Chan, UC-Irvine, psychsignr6@gmail.com
Region 7: Kuljit Dhaliwal, University of British Columbia, & Peter Jackson, University of Utah, psychsignr7@gmail.com
We all recently returned from our 5th Annual National Conference in New Orleans, where we were joined by 70 other medical students from around the country for 3 days of good times and general shrinkitude. Thanks to everyone who came down and made our meeting such an incredible success! Thanks also to Lara Cox and the other 2009-10 chairs for putting everything together. For those of you unable to attend, I’ve included a brief summary below.
On Friday evening, we had dinner sponsored by a number of professional subspecialty organizations in psychiatry; faculty members spoke about their excitement for the future of psychiatry and their particular areas of interest. The dinner was followed by an informal meet and greet at the Sheraton’s Pelican Bar which soon transitioned over onto Bourbon Street.
On Saturday morning, Lara formally began the conference with a wonderful keynote address before introducing David Lewis to speak about his work with schizophrenia and the development of our understanding of its biological underpinnings. We then split off by class year to get stage specific advice from Drs. Cox, Schlozman, Borja, and Mintz. In the next breakout session, some of us heard about the roles that media can pay in psychiatric practice from Steve Schlozman and Sergio Hernandez, while the others discussed psychiatric consequences of trauma with John Roca and Donald Sharps.
After lunch, half of the group heard from Joseph English and Lizbet Boroughs about the political and economic intricacies of psychiatric healthcare reform, in the context of the new Health Bill. Meanwhile, the rest of the group learned about psychotherapy from David Mintz, Adam Brenner, and Donna Sudak.
Our second plenary consisted of a rousing point counterpoint discussion of the DSM-V. William Narrow of the APA described the new directions that the manual is taking, while Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins warned us of the consequences of allowing psychiatry to continue limiting itself to DSM diagnosis. We then conducted our regional elections before enjoying a great poster session in the Sheraton’s Napoleon Room. At night, many of us joined Steve Schlozman and George Romero for a viewing and discussion of Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion”. Remembering that we were in New Orleans, we eventually found ourselves back on Bourbon Street.
On Sunday morning, we had breakfast and enjoyed a panel of residents from every PsychSIGN region advising us on our next steps and answering questions about applying to residency. Finally, at noon, the new executive board met for the first time.
We all had a wonderful time at the conference, and would like to thank all of you who were able to attend once more. I hope to see even more of you at our conference in Hawaii next May! I’d also like to give you a preview of the things we have planned for this next year.
Keep your eye on our website (www.psychsign.org) for many of our new developments; we will be adding all sorts of new content over the course of the year. One of the many things that we plan to establish through the website is a Career Corner, where video and written interviews with psychiatrists from a variety of subspecialties discuss their paths and careers. We also provide a National Depression Screening Day toolkit online, with journal articles, personal anecdotes, and a Powerpoint presentation targeted specifically at depression in medical students and healthcare professionals; we would like to see a National Depression Screening Day event happening at every school in order to work towards student wellness and stigma reduction.
Over the course of this year, please be in touch with your regional chair about any psych events in your area or at your school. They can be a great resource for your school’s group, assisting with finding funding and attendees. We also have some great ideas for your student interest group activities. You can find some of these on the website and others by speaking with your regional chair.
Thank you so much! This is going to be a great year for us, and I look forward to working with you over the course of the year and seeing you in Hawaii next spring!
Sincerely,
Paul Nestadt
