Psychiatry Clerkship Bootcamp Introduction

0:00 This talk is an introduction for the Psychiatry Clerkship Boot Camp. This talk will outline every video included in the Psychiatry Clerkship Boot Camp playlist as of May 2025 and is meant to help you plan your studying. Before I show the outline, I want to point out that I use a lot of shorthand and abbreviations in my talks. Most of the shortorthand should be self-explanatory in context, and for many videos, I provide a key in the description. Nevertheless, here's a list of some of the more common abbreviations I use for psychiatric disorders and medications. I also use a color coding system where different colors represent different disorders, disease processes, and medications, which I hope is a useful memory aid. Most of these I chose based on how these disease processes are commonly represented in media. For example, a gloomy dark blue for

0:46 depression and a fiery dark red for mania, but some I've chosen arbitrarily. And here are a few other abbreviations that I use most often. With that covered, let's move on to the outline. There are six major topics I cover in this curriculum, which are all fundamental topics that medical students should learn while completing their psychiatry clerkship. The first is basic skills, then psychiatric medication, then psychiatric diagnosis, then psychiatric treatment principles, then emergency psychiatry, and finally psychotherapy principles. Any of these major categories can be studied in any order preferred, although it's probably best to start with basics. Let's review the videos in each of these categories. First, under the basics category, there are three subcategories of skills:

1:32 history taking, mental status exam, and assessment. The videos under history taking are psychiatric history and interval history. These should be viewed in this order with psychiatric history first and interval history next. The videos under mental status exam are mental status exam, mental status exam archetypes and affect and thought process and again are best viewed in this order. The videos under assessment are differential diagnosis, medical causes of psychiatric symptoms, assessment and formulation and the perspectives of psychiatry. The last of which brings together various perspectives on psychiatric assessment and I think serves as a nice conclusion. Moving on to medication, you should start with the psychiatric medication overview video, which provides a big picture summary of the various classes of medications used in psychiatric

2:17 practice. From there, you can watch the videos on the individual medication classes in any order. I've put them in order in the playlist according to an arbitrary ordering of psychiatric disorders in my mind where depression is first, anxiety second, mania third, psychosis fourth, and so on. Moving on to diagnosis, you should start with the psychiatric diagnosis overview video which provides a big picture summary and organizational schema for the various psychiatric diagnosis. From there, similarly to the medication videos, you can watch the videos on the individual diagnostic classes in any order. It may also be helpful to jump back and forth between the medication video and corresponding diagnosis video. For treatment, start with the principles of choosing psychotropics and medication trial history videos. Then you can watch

3:03 the treatment algorithm videos for major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia in any order. For emergency psychiatry, start with the medical emergencies and psychiatry overview. Then you can watch the other emergency psychiatry videos in any order. Finally, the therapy videos can be watched in any order. In its current state, I would say this curriculum serves as a relatively complete overview of the fundamental concepts you need to excel in the psychiatric clerkship and be completed in less than 3 and 1/2 hours. That's less than 2 hours and 15 minutes at 1.5x speed, which is my preferred listening speed. Even I can't tolerate my own voice for a full 5 minutes. This curriculum won't cover all the nitty-gritty details you'll need to ace your psychiatry shelf exam, but it should serve as a useful starting place for understanding the important concepts

3:50 in the practice of psychiatry and for organizing your knowledge about psychiatric medications and disorders. In case you're interested, my future goals for this curriculum are listed here, including my pie in the sky goal of becoming the definitive standard curriculum used across all US medical schools. With all that said, I'm open to feedback and to suggestions for video topics. When I first started giving chalk talks way back when I was an upper level medical student, I designed my talks based on trying to remember what it was like to be a new student of medicine and of psychiatry. That beginner's mindset has continued to be helpful, but I'm further away from the experience of being a medical student now. So, reminders from current and recent students are always helpful. So, please do leave comments with any feedback or suggestions. They are much appreciated and help me to become a

4:36 better educator. That's the end of this talk. I hope you'll find this curriculum to be a useful road map to your journey into psychiatry. And as always, thank you.