To stimulate interest in educating residents about psychotherapy, APA’s Commission on Psychotherapy by Psychiatrists (COPP) sponsored an all-day workshop last month before the annual meeting of the American Association of Psychiatric Residency Training Directors (AADPRT) in Puerto Rico.

David Goldberg, M.D., AADPRT’s liaison to COPP and workshop chair, later told Psychiatric News that group, family/marital, and child/adolescent psychotherapies were selected as the workshop topics because of their relevance to general psychiatric training.

"We want residents to be able to see the individual patient in a larger context such as groups or families and to be competent in all forms of psychotherapy," said Goldberg, who is also the executive director of AADPRT.

Another goal of the workshop was to discuss common objectives for residents trained in the three forms of psychotherapy, said Goldberg.

"We encourage training directors to look at new ways of developing curricula with clear expectations in terms of knowledge and experiences. In the past, psychotherapy education was left largely up to individual supervisors, and no one knew what the teaching objectives were," observed Goldberg. "We also have less time than in the past to devote to teaching psychotherapy, so we need to be more efficient."

In addition to the workshop’s lectures on the three modalities of psychotherapy, special-interest groups discussed topics such as teaching group psychotherapy with adolescents and teaching family therapy with children and adolescents, said Goldberg. There were also videotaped vignettes on challenges facing supervisors in training residents about psychotherapy and work groups on special topics, including faculty and supervisor development and the use of video and other technology in training.

The topics for this year’s workshop were requested by many participants in COPP’s first workshop on individual psychotherapy held prior to last year’s AADPRT annual meeting.

"Participants were equally excited about this year’s workshop, and we plan to continue sponsoring symposia like this to strengthen psychotherapy education," said Goldberg.

He noted that the amount of curriculum time devoted to teaching psychiatric residents how to conduct psychotherapy has decreased significantly in the last decade.