PGY-3 Overview

Schedule and Locations

During the third residency year, your goal will be to deepen your understanding of diagnosis and formulation and to develop your competence in the long-term management of psychiatric illness.

Outpatient Psychiatry

Duration: 12 months
Location: Parkland Hospital

Child Psychiatry

Duration: 4 months
Location: Children’s Medical Center

First Selective

Duration: 4 months
Location: Depends on selective chosen

Second Selective

Duration: 4 months
Location: Depends on selective chosen

Psychotherapy

Duration: 12 months
Location: UT Southwestern Psychotherapy Clinic

Student Mental Health or Psychiatric Primary Care (half-days)

Duration: 12 months
Locations: University of Texas at Dallas Student Mental Health Clinic or VA Medical Center

What You Will Learn

You will explore advanced psychotherapies and study more advanced neuroscience and pharmacology.  You will attend a continuous case conference, and you will likely continue your class’ TrainingGroup experience through this third year.

As a resident in the Research Track program, you will continue to attend research seminars that provide an interactive format in which to learn about current research being conducted at the University.

Balance and Diversity

As a third-year resident, you will spend one day a week at the outpatient clinic at Parkland Hospital. Here you will learn to manage acute and chronic psychiatric illness through pharmacotherapy, supportive therapy, crisis management, and systems interventions. The patient population is ethnically diverse and is challenged by socioeconomic hardship and intensive medical co-morbidity. 

On another day of the week, you will attend in the UT Southwestern Psychotherapy Clinic learning intensive psychotherapy, both psychoanalytic and cognitive-behavioral, with higher functioning patients. You will co-lead a group therapy, as well. Your supervision will be necessarily intensive, generally consisting of three hours per week with individual therapy supervisors.

You will also spend an additional half-day at either a student mental health clinic, as a consultant embedded in the Parkland Internal Medicine Clinic, or at an innovative primary care clinic (PsyPCE) at the VA, where you will learn to manage both medical and psychiatric issues under the supervision of internal medicine and psychiatry attending physicians.

Opportunities                                                                                            

For subspecialty training, you will be able to choose family and couples therapy.

What Makes Our Program Special

Our outpatient training is both diverse and extensively supervised. Each training site provides individual supervision, a clinical case conference, a journal club, and a didactic survey of topics relevant to the practice of outpatient psychiatry. In the psychotherapy clinic you will be supervised by psychoanalysts and cognitive-behavioral specialists. In the Parkland Outpatient Clinic, our central site for learning psychopharmacology and general psychiatric management, we have attendings on site in the clinic whose only role is to provide supervision and teaching for residents.

We are at the vanguard in providing training in the integration of psychiatry and primary care, through an array of models that include the Psychiatry Primary Care Experience, where our residents provide the entirety of their patients’ treatment – both the psychiatric as well as the primary care – and are jointly supervised by a psychiatrist and an internist.

In addition, we offer multiple elective opportunities designed to foster the development of your own unique interests in psychiatry. You may also choose an elective seminar on reading fiction through a psychoanalytic lens that is offered in the spring. 

As a resident in the Research Track program, you will begin to formulate your research topics with the guidance of your Primary Faculty Mentor and RT Resident Advisor.