Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Residency Program

Since 1983 the Georgia Health Sciences University Has maintained a fully accredited ACGME Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Residency Training Program.  The Program’s goal is to recruit bright, energetic, highly motivated physicians who want to become child and adolescent psychiatrists and to provide opportunities for development into any of the myriad of possibilities for practice and leadership in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry.  The Program strives to create a learning environment that motivates the trainee toward self learning and experiential learning, promoting a developmental approach to the comprehensive assessment, diagnosis and evidence based treatment of the wide range of child, adolescent and family psychopathology, integrating biological, psychological and social interactive influences with typical development across the life cycle through adolescence. 

Our program is fortunate to be in an institution that is nationally known for its focus on patient and family centered care in pediatrics and in a department that has been a national leader in the recovery model in general psychiatry.  This environment facilitates our goals of integrating biological, neurological and social sciences to focus excellent science such a way as to make our work with families patient and family centered, involving the family and patient throughout the process.  We augment this approach with experiential learning about culture and spirituality and its influence on the family’s approach to and acceptance of psychiatric interventions.  Our trainees not only are well trained in child and adolescent psychiatry basics but in the broader aspects of what our field means to the family and the community, thus making our work more effective and more collaborative.

The specific goals of the child and adolescent psychiatry training include acquiring the skills and knowledge along with the attitudes to:

• Comprehensively evaluate children from infancy through late adolescence and their families for developmental abnormalities and psychiatric disorders and to develop with the family and the patient evidence based comprehensive treatment plans and implement these.
• Provide a range of indicated treatment modalities for children and adolescents with psychiatric disorders and their families, including a variety of brief and longer term psychotherapies, individual, family and group as well as psychopharmacology.
• Develop consultative and liaison skills to provide services in a variety of hospital and community settings that provide mental health services to children and their families to include pediatric hospitals and outpatient clinics, schools, the juvenile justice/forensic system and community mental health systems of care.
• Integrate patient and family centered as well as Recovery model approaches into the daily practice of child and adolescent psychiatry