A hush fell over the room as eager medical students filled all the seats. They wondered what was in store. The first day of anatomy class? Board exams?

Neither. Stuart Twemlow, M.D., a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, took the podium to describe his work with the FBI developing a psychiatric profile of the young people who have recently killed fellow classmates in schools across the country.

Arranged by the Psychiatry Workforce Coalition, this presentation was for medical students attending the 2000 American Medical Students Association (AMSA) annual convention in Washington, D.C.

After his presentation Dr. Twemlow and AMSA liaison to the coalition, Jennifer Rosen, a first-year medical student at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, remained to chat with medical students interested in psychiatry careers.

This is just one of many efforts of the two-year-old Psychiatry Workforce Coalition, which I chair. I am the consultant to the APA Committee on Graduate Medical Education and chair of the Workforce Committee of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training (AADPRT).

The coalition is composed of organizations involved in psychiatric education, in partnership with medical student organizations. Its aim is to ensure that medical students are well-informed regarding the wide range of knowledge, interests, and skills of modern psychiatrists.

The coalition also hopes to maximize collaboration between medical students interested in primary care and medical specialties and psychiatry, highlight the importance of understanding the behavioral and emotional issues underlying general medical illness and the physician-patient relationship, educate medical students in physician wellness, and enhance the recruitment of ethnically and racially diverse students into psychiatry.

Bringing psychiatry to the national meetings of medical student organizations has been a core objective of the coalition. Although student organizations have been open to requests from the coalition to arrange psychiatry programs at their annual meetings, medical students have been surprised to learn about the expertise of psychiatry in areas often addressed by other specialists, for example, youth violence and substance abuse.

In 1999 through the efforts of the coalition, Leah Dickstein, M.D., a member of APA’s Committee on Medical Student Education and chair of the APA/Bristol-Myers Squibb Fellowship Selection Committee, presented the program "Medical Student Well-Being" at the AMSA annual convention, where she received the first joint APA/AMSA award for work in medical student well-being. Also at the meeting, local psychiatry leaders met with students interested in psychiatry.

In other related activities, Francis Lu, M.D., representing the Association for Academic Psychiatry in the Psychiatry Workforce Coalition, has addressed attendees at the Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association (APAMS) meeting regarding cultural competence issues. In 1999 he led a workshop in which Asian-American psychiatry residents spoke about their decision to enter psychiatry. Through APA’s Committee of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian Psychiatrists, Chair Richard Livingston, M.D., addressed a meeting of the Association of Native American Medical Students (ANAMS).

Although these were not strictly coalition activities, the coalition has served to bring attention to the need for psychiatrist-led medical student activities, and in each of these situations a coalition member was active in facilitating the program.

To provide a greater presence for psychiatry at the annual meetings of student organizations, the coalition, APA’s Committee of Residents and Fellows (CORF), and student liaisons to the coalition have arranged for local residents and faculty to assist staff of APA’s Office of Graduate and Undergraduate Education at the APA booth at AMSA and the Student National Medical Association (SNMA) meetings. Originally an outgrowth of the AADPRT Workforce Committee, the Workforce Coalition includes membership by the following psychiatric organizations in addition to AADPRT: Association for Academic Psychiatry, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Association of Community Psychiatrists, Association of Directors of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry, and APA.

The medical student organizations participating include AMSA, SNMA, APAMS, and ANAMS. Plans are in progress to include National Latino American Medical Students (NLAMS), American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA), and AMA’s Medical Student Section.

We hope that the coalition will serve as a stimulus for these and other organizations to pay closer attention to the needs of medical students. And we hope that the coalition can be a rallying point for its member organizations as they move forward with programs designed to better inform students about the excitement of modern psychiatry. 

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Dr. Mellman is chair of the Psychiatry Workforce Coalition and chair of the Workforce Committee of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training.