PGY-2 Overview
Schedule and Locations
The second year of residency is designed to establish your identity as a psychiatrist and your ability to diagnose and manage the acute presentations of all major areas of psychopathology in an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse population of patients.
General Inpatient
Duration: 5 months
Locations: Parkland Hospital, University Hospital-Zale Lipshy, VA Medical Center
Psychiatric Emergency Services
Duration: 1 month
Location: Parkland Psychiatric Emergency Room
Selective
Duration: 1 month
Location: Depends on selective chosen
Geriatric Psychiatry
Duration: 1 month
Location: VA Medical Center
Community Psychiatry
Duration: 1 month
Location: Dallas County Jail
Consultant-Liaison Psychiatry
Duration: 3 months
Locations: Parkland Hospital and Children’s Medical Center
What the Resident Will Learn
One day each week is set aside for seminars.
Psychosocial Foundations of Psychiatry: Covers the life cycle, basic psychoanalytic concepts, socio-cultural psychiatry, learning theory, cognitive theory, and family-systems theory.
Fundamentals of Neuroscience: Learn the neuroscientific underpinnings of modern diagnosis and treatment.
Psychotherapy Continuous Case Conference: Discuss your new psychotherapy case with experienced and supportive faculty.
You will also devote an hour each week to the unstructured Training-Group (or “T-Group”) that emphasizes mutual support, problem solving, and experiential learning about small group processes. You will follow this up with eight weeks of introductory didactics covering small group theory and process.
If you elect to pursue the Research Track program, you will attend weekly sessions covering topics such as research design, data analysis, writing grants, and the critical evaluation of research literature. You will also attend a seminar series that will familiarize you with the research process.
Balance and Diversity
As a second-year resident, you will learn inpatient management skills for adult inpatient and consult services at Parkland Health and Hospital Systems, the North Texas Veterans Affairs Health Care System, and Zale-Lipshy University Hospital. PGY-2 residents will become intimately acquainted with the major psychiatric disorders and will learn pharmacologic, psychotherapeutic, electroconvulsive, and team management approaches to severely-disturbed psychiatric patients.
Community Psychiatry is strongly emphasized in every rotation and especially during the one month at Parkland Hospital’s treatment team at the Dallas County Jail, an innovative program aimed to provide top quality psychiatric treatment to inmates, a historically underserved group.
The full range of the life cycle is experienced during your second year, with rotations in Geriatric Psychiatry at the VA Medical Center, and Child Psychiatry on the consult-liaison service at Children’s Hospital. You will also return for one month to emergency psychiatry where you will experience a step up in responsibility - overseeing other mental health professionals, managing acute crises, and taking the lead in medical student education.
Opportunities
You will be provided a broad range of options for your one-month selective, including:
- Clinical rotations that include inpatient child psychiatry, child day-treatment, sleep medicine, forensics, telepsychiatry, and many others
- Additional community programs including a program for offenders,
- Clinical research clinics (Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, Depression, Family Studies, Women’s Mental Health)
Residents in the Research Track program will begin to meet with their mentors to establish relationships with research faculty and to begin to explore areas of research interests.
What Makes Our Program Special
Psychotherapy
In your second year as a resident, you will begin treating your first psychotherapy patient in the fall, adding a second long-term case in the winter. You will be supported with individual supervision, as well as a psychotherapy case conference during your didactics day.
Elective Time
We reserve one month in the PGY-2 year as elective so that you can begin to explore and define your own passions and aspirations for your career.