Resident Interest and Affinity Groups

The mission of the Asian and Pacific Islander Residents Association is to support and promote the experience of trainees who are of Pacific Islander and Asian descent in the Yale Psychiatry Department. We celebrate the vast diversity that exists in our communities and, as people of color, seek justice and equity for all those who confront racism and xenophobia in our society. We seek to accomplish this vision through building relationships with allies, supporting diverse recruitment, fostering mentorship, improving medical education, raising consciousness, and advocating for AAPI needs within our department and through active engagement with the communities whom we care for.

Types of events that this group sponsors include:

• Teach-ins on AAPI history
• Sharing cuisine from our various cultures and backgrounds (e.g. cooking a meal together and learning about its history through ingredients and dishes).
• Social gatherings within the AAPI group itself
• Social gatherings and cosponsored gatherings with other LGBTQIA* and BIPOC groups within the department.
• Healing gatherings exploring and discussing the history of traditional practices (e.g. local Qi Gong practitioners, yoga).
• Community art project workshops (e.g. Kitsungi)
• Cultural activities (field trips to theatre productions and art exhibitions, film screenings, book clubs)
• Invited speakers on AAPI-related topics

A regular convening of interested members of the Department to learn more about the impacts of climate change on mental health; to identify potential contributions to climate action; and to develop research and scholarship collaborations to address root causes of the climate crisis and to mitigate climate distress.

Some events organized by the group include:

• Monthly Speaker Series (with a focus on interdisciplinary experts)
• Mixers to foster Inter-departmental collaboration efforts
• Working group focused on launching inter-departmental initiatives and research
• Annual symposium highlighting efforts across New Haven and eventually the broader community
• Creating a platform for connecting mentees with mentors working on issues of climate change

The Geriatric Psychiatry interest group strives to foster interest in Geriatric Psychiatry and provide trainees with exposure to the care of older adults, as well as connect with mentorship. The group provides an environment for interdisciplinary learning and partnerships with important community players, discusses larger topics such as ageism, loneliness, end of life, dementia, and changes that occur with age that impact the mental health of geriatric patients, and creates opportunities to engage with older adults in the New Haven area.

The following are some events the group plans to organize:

• Conversations about Medicare Reform.
• Ageism and Dementia in the Media.
• Discussions about impact of loneliness as a mental health crisis.
• Outreach events to address needs of unhoused older adults.
• Intergenerational opportunities in the community (several local non-profits, such as For All Ages).

The Yale Global Mental Health Program (GMHP) exists to supplement and support existing didactic and clinical curriculum of the residency program. Residents/fellows interested in doing GMHP-related education may do so during elective times and during selective experiences. The Global Mental Health Elective experiences will be open to all residents/fellows in the program and to others in the medical school and university.

The goals of the Yale Global Mental Health Program are:

• Global Mental Health Awareness: To promote awareness of issues of global mental health and social disparities.
• Practical Implementation in Clinical Settings: To develop practice tools to address these issues both at home and abroad.
• Underserved Access to Care: To promote interest in working with underserved populations within and outside the United States that are in need of mental health services.
• Cross Cultural Psychiatry in Practice: To expand the knowledge of cross cultural psychiatry and provide ways for residents to incorporate that knowledge into their clinical practice of psychiatry.
• Networking: To develop within and external to the department of psychiatry a network of individuals with common interests in global mental health from which collaborative ideas and projects can spring.

InterPsych is a supportive community for International Medical Graduates in the Yale Department of Psychiatry. Primarily, we aim to support each other through the unique challenges faced by residents and faculty who completed medical school outside of the U.S., or otherwise share similar lived experiences.

Examples of the kinds of events organized by this group include:

• Support session for newly matched IMG residents (e.g., Q&A, assisting with housing, visa, etc.).
• In-person welcome happy hour celebration with new IMG residents.
• Yearly cultural potluck dinner celebrating the cuisine from our various countries of origin, for
• residents and faculty.
• Informational session for IMG residency applicants in partnership with RAMP Up.
• Mentorship Mixers where residents and faculty may meet and connect over shared interests.

The purpose of the Interventional Psychiatry Research Group (IPRG) is to cultivate research that informs and expands the treatments offered by the Interventional Psychiatry Service. More broadly, the group will discuss ways to map and modulate the aberrant neural networks implicated in neuropsychiatric disease. Neuroimaging (fMRI, PET), brain stimulation (transcranial magnetic stimulation, electroconvulsive therapy, deep brain stimulation, vagal nerve stimulation) and novel psychopharmacological agents (ketamine) will all be discussed. The establishment of this group will hopefully create a sense of community among those who study, prescribe and deliver neuromodulatory techniques.

We are a collective of Residents, Fellows, and Attendings devoted to safeguarding an inclusive space that is celebratory of our heterogeneous backgrounds and driven by a sense of service to local Latinx/Hispanic communities.

Community Outreach: We hope to leverage our identities to create lasting ties and collaboration with Latinx/Hispanic organizations in the Greater New Haven community and support existing advocacy and policy development efforts.

Building Community in the Department: We are devoted to fostering an inclusive, warm, and supportive environment for Latinx/Hispanic trainees and faculty in the Department of Psychiatry. Accordingly, we will sponsor spaces to talk about our shared and unique identities and explore how to support and empower each other.

Clinical Excellence: In the spirit of La Clínica Hispana, we are committed to professional excellence and will continue delivering high quality care with language concordance and cultural humility.

Educational Enrichment: Through our curriculum development and research initiatives, we hope to eradicate practices in the field of medicine that compromise the goal of providing evidence-based, culturally sensitive care to our Latinx/Hispanic patients. We will share our knowledge about Hispanic culture and mental health with professional and community organizations to increase the number of healthcare professionals who are equipped to help Hispanic/Latinx clients.

Mentorship, Professional Development & Retention: We will remain integral to the recruitment and retention of underrepresented minorities in medicine in the Yale Department of Psychiatry. Accordingly, we will sponsor and curate opportunities for mentorship and health professions exposure of those from disadvantaged backgrounds. We will support the advancement and professional development of our Hispanic faculty to increase the number of mentors, biomedical researchers, and leaders in our health centers.

Lifestyle Psychiatry is a growing field which examines the relationship between mental health and lifestyle behaviors. These health behaviors aim to optimize our wellness through nutrition, physician activity, restorative sleep, stress management, harm reduction, and connectedness. The interest group will explore how lifestyle interventions can be used alongside psychopharmacology and psychotherapy and how we can practice healthy habits in own lives. Our goal is to celebrate the collaboration between mental health care and lifestyle medicine as a holistic approach to cultivating well-being and resilience.

The interest group plans to sponsor events related to:

• Introducing residents to the field of lifestyle psychiatry (e.g., clinical work and research at Yale) and developed lifestyle psychiatry clinics/programs outside of Yale .
• Practicing lifestyle behaviors among residents and evaluating the evidence of lifestyle practices to treat the whole person and support our wellness.
• Understanding the resources and barriers to practice lifestyle behaviors among the patient populations we care for.

PsychedOut is comprised of a group of queer and allied residents dedicated to promoting LGBT mental health at Yale and in the New Haven community through service, education, and recruitment.

The hope is to become better informed about how individual clinicians can become patient advocates, not only in the immediate clinical setting, but on a larger, system-wide setting. The primary goal of this group is to identify some of the potential challenges seen in the current healthcare system and to discuss solutions within the context of mental health policy and services. In doing so, we plan to use different meeting formats, including debates, current event discussions, case study presentations, and individual/panel speakers. The discussion group will provide a safe forum to think about and talk about different vantage points within the complex healthcare ecosystem. We hope to also invite participants from other health-related fields of psychology, primary care, public health, public policy, law, etc.

The goals of MHAY are:

• Provide an opportunity for peer reflection and gather information about a wide variety of topics in order to mutually learn about how policies and healthcare systems can impact psychiatric practice on a regular basis.
• Postulate about the inefficiencies and benefits within various existing clinical settings in order to synthesize ideas for more effective projects and programs.
• Develop working groups to address and expand key themes that are identified.
• Identify topic areas in social psychiatry and public health that are useful/practical for residents and other stakeholders to learn about, with the hopes of developing a generalizable curriculum around these themes.

Increasingly, technology plays a role in the diagnosis, treatment and management, and prognosis of mental illness. The Psychiatry Technology Group (Psych Tech Group) aims to explore applications of existing and future technologies in psychiatry and mental health. A fundamental component of successful technology application is design, which recognizes and incorporates the needs and behaviors of clinicians and the patients they serve. The group meets monthly to discuss numerous topics ranging from social media and mobile devices to robotics and machine learning with scholars from across campus. These discussions serve as a forum for residents, faculty, and other interested participants on campus.

• Promote the development and dissemination of knowledge in the use of technology in psychiatry and mental health.
• Facilitate workshops on design principles to inform use of technology in psychiatry and mental health.

The Psychotherapy Interest Group will offer additional opportunities for residents to learn more about various psychotherapy modalities through organized luncheons or evening talks, reading groups, mentorship, and process groups.

This group organizes the following activities:

• Lunch and/or Evening Talks
• Reading Group
• Mentorship
• Process Groups

For residents hoping to practice pubic psychiatry, we first have the task of understanding it. To that end, the Public Psychiatry Resident Interest Group will serve as a platform for our exploration of themes, history, and current practices within public psychiatry. In doing so, we hope to foster “a sense of continuing possibility*” among the trainees who engage with it.

The second mission of this interest group is to bring together across all years of training to share knowledge and resources. Above all, we aim to support each other’s motivations and hopes through conversation and community.

*Rowe M, Lawless M, Thompson K, and Davidson L (2011). Classics of Community Psychiatry: Fifty Years of Public Mental Health Outside the Hospital. Oxford University Press. New York, NY.

The mission of the interest group is to advance the study of the structural conditions (i.e. the historical, political, economic, cultural and ideological) that help determine the organization and delivery of psychiatric systems and care, on the one hand, and the manifestation and patterns of psychiatric illness, on the other. The group will draw on work from the humanities and social sciences (e.g. history of medicine and psychiatry; medical and sociocultural anthropology; disability studies; geography; English and comparative literature) as well as public health and the law and seek to develop and deepen collaborations with graduate students and scholars in those fields at Yale and across the country. It will seek to inform our clinical formulations for individuals and communities of people and our imagination for individual and collective interventions.

The YSCFA specific focus is on the support of residents of African-American or African descent in order to formally help with recruitment of black residents and to increase community outreach and education initiatives in the New Haven area. The goals of the group are to foster mentorship of these residents, cultural literacy of all members of the department, increase recruitment of medical students of African-American or African descent into Psychiatry and the department, and raise community awareness about mental illness.

Topics discussed include:

• Being Black in Academia
• The Business of Medicine
• Being Black at Yale
• Global Psychiatry
• Supporting Residents During Training

Women in a Psychiatry is a safe space for women to receive support, foster diversity, and discuss their experiences in medicine in addition to other pressing issues. Women in Psychiatry serves as a platform to develop mentorship relationships and to network as well as promote professional and leadership development. Events held by this group include quarterly lunches with faculty and guest lectures and wine and cheese nights.

The Women’s Mental Health Interest Group is dedicated to improving training and education regarding mental health disparities and clinical issues that chiefly affect individuals who identify as women. The group is comprised of medical students, residents, and faculty who are interested in better caring for women suffering from mental health issues. Topics covered may include gender-based violence such as sexual trauma, intimate partner violence, perinatal psychiatry, fertility and mental health, and eating and body image disorders. Additionally, the group also advocates for increased training opportunities and clinical focus on women’s mental health within the residency program and department.