Medical Students View Clinical Psychiatry

To investigate the relevance of various components of psychiatric teaching to the later practice of medicine, the authors asked 126 medical students to rate their perceptions of clinical psychiatric work and to assess their view of psychiatry before and after a clerkship. The students rated their experiences in descending order of usefulness as follows: outpatient treatment, emergency service, didactic seminar, child psychiatry, and inpatient treatment. They also recorded statistically significant changes in their perceptions of themselves with regard to psychiatric patients as they gained clinical experience.