The Yale Department of Psychiatry’s Social Justice and Health Equity Curriculum (SJHE) is expanding beyond the psychiatry residency program and is now being used across Yale College’s undergraduate medical education curriculum.
Carmen Black, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry and director of SJHE, and the program’s content and expertise about racial and institutional trauma was featured for the second year in January 2023 in the Interprofessional Longitudinal Clinical Experience (ILCE) Trauma-Informed Care lecture.
ILCE is a collaborative curriculum given to first-year students of the MD program, physician associate program, and nurse practitioner program at Yale. This ILCE collaboration also sparked an interdisciplinary publication in the upcoming April 2023 issue of the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics titled, “Undoing Institutional and Racial Trauma Through Interprofessional Trauma-Informed Education.”
Also, SJHE content and expertise about de-policing mental healthcare is now a core lecture for the psychiatry clerkship didactic curriculum. This notably includes Black’s acceptance to give a workshop at the national psychiatry clerkship directors meeting in June 2023 in San Diego titled, “Social Justice in Psychiatry Clerkship Education: An Evidence-Based Counternarrative to the Policing of Mental Heathcare.”
This new collaboration with the psychiatry clerkship education is being spearheaded by psychiatry faculty including Black; Marco Ramos, MD, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and faculty track leader of the History of Medicine in SJHE; Kirsten Wilkins, MD, professor of psychiatry and director of medical student education in the Yale Department of Psychiatry; Pamela Petersen-Crair, MD, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry; and Pochu Ho, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry.
SJHE is also sponsoring first authorship opportunities for psychiatry clerkship students through its most recent publication in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry titled, “Psychotic Misdiagnosis of Racially Minoritized Patients: A Case-Based Ethics, Equity, and Educational Exploration” with Yale medical student Anita Jegarl as first author.
Black said the SJHE-affiliated curriculum is poised to become a national leader in social justice education in undergraduate medical education and beyond.