Welcome to Psychiatry in Practice: The Clinical Skills
Series.
Students often tell us that when they are learning psychiatry in
their medical school course they would really like to see
experienced psychiatrists interviewing patients, taking a history
and conducting a mental state examination. So with this in mind we
have designed this series to help students learn some essential
skills in psychiatry.
You are going to see a series of clinical scenarios in which
different patients are being interviewed by psychiatrists. All of
these scenarios are based upon real patients and they were put
together with patient groups. The patients are played by actors,
but real psychiatrists are conducting the
interviews.
The interviews were not scripted in any way and the
psychiatrists did not know any information about the patients they
were being asked to interview. This was to give students a
realistic experience of what it is like to carry out an interview
when you don't know very much about the background of the patient
and you have never met them before. It also means that the
interviews are not perfect, in the same way that they are not
perfect in real life, and that the situations
are complex, raising many issues.
At the end of each scenario the psychiatrist will reflect on some
key points and discuss what was going through their minds while
they were conducting the interview. To get the most out of
these tutorials you should try to think about how you would go
about approaching each patient, what information you would need to
obtain, and how you would carry out and record your mental state
examination.
We hope you find the series both useful and enjoyable.
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Please click the links below to begin your chosen
tutorial.
A collaboration between the Royal College of Psychiatrists and
Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry.

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