The Teaching of Psychiatry to the Nonpsychiatrist Physician
M. RALPH KAUFMAN M.D.1
1 Esther & Joseph Klingenstein Professor of Psychiatry, Chairman, Department of Psychiatry, and Dean, the Page and William Black Post-Graduate School of Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, City University of New York, N.Y. 10029
The author stresses the need for nonpsychiatrist physicians to learn about psychiatry in terms of their own frame of reference. This is also true of medical students, most of whom will not go into psychiatry. He outlines some of the reasons for the difficulties in equipping nonpsychiatrist physicians with psychiatric skills; some have to do with unconscious resistances and some with faulty teaching techniques. Use of a general hospital liaison service sometimes overcomes the difficulties.
