Yale Hispanic Psychiatry Fellowship

The Yale Hispanic Psychiatry Fellowship provides advanced training in culturally sensitive and recovery-oriented behavioral health services for Latinx populations. Culture, race, ethnicity, and language influence communication between patients and providers, health access, and treatment outcomes. There is strong evidence that cultural differences contribute to health disparities and unequal access to care, and that cultural knowledge and identity are significant determinants of treatment outcomes.

Since the early 1970s, the Yale Department of Psychiatry in collaboration with the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) have been developing culturally and linguistically appropriate programs to serve the Latinx community. This collaboration has produced the Hispanic Clinic of the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC), the CT Latino Behavioral Health System (LBHS) and the DMHAS Health Disparities Initiative, a public-private partnership between DMHAS and the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH).

A shared mission among these programs is to improve access to care for monolingual Spanish speakers by incorporating the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health and Health Care (The National CLAS Standards). The services continue to expand and respond to the growing needs of the community. These programs are the basis for the Yale Hispanic Psychiatry fellowship.

Trainees will gain knowledge and skills focused on recovery-oriented and culturally appropriate mental health services for the Latinx community with a focus on promoting systems change.

Fellows will:

• Understand the barriers bilingual and monolingual Latinx patients encounter when trying to access behavioral health services and identify ways to address them.
• Demonstrate care that is culturally appropriate, compassionate, and effective for recovery-oriented treatment of mental health issues.
• Consider health disparities, stigma, and structural influences in the care of patients when developing treatment recommendations.
• Apply medical knowledge that is appropriate for recovery from mental health issues considering culture, values, barriers, and structural influences.
• Demonstrate abilities to educate systems of care about health disparities, structural influences, stigma, unconscious bias, micro-aggressions and culturally sensitive interventions.
• Gain expertise in the training and supervision of medical students, psychiatric residents, and multidisciplinary clinical staff.
• Review mental health clinical practice to develop and implement a recovery-oriented and culturally sensitive service-related research project.