Schedule and Locations

During the third residency year, your goal will be to deepen your understanding of diagnosis and formulation and to develop your competence in the long-term management of psychiatric illness.

Outpatient Psychiatry

Duration: 12 months, 1 full day per week (residents can choose Monday, Thursday, or Friday)
Location: Parkland Hospital

Call expectations: No formal call duties but residents are responsible for checking their EPIC in-baskets, responding to pages, and returning voicemails for their clinic patients.

Duties include managing patients with chronic psychiatric illness in a yearlong continuity clinic. Residents will become competent in outpatient medication management, including depot antipsychotic treatment and clozapine. You will also learn short-term psychotherapeutic treatments, group therapy, and motivational interviewing and how to connect patients with social services.

Child Psychiatry

Duration: 4 months
Location: Children’s Medical Center; Metrocare Services

Call duties: Depends on rotation. Minimal or none.

Residents choose from a wide variety of child and adolescent electives to meet requirements of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

First Elective

Duration: 4 months
Location: Varies, depending on chosen elective

See elective listing.

Second Elective

Duration: 4 months
Location: Varies, depending on chosen elective

See elective listing.

Psychotherapy

Duration: 12 months
Location: UT Southwestern Psychotherapy Clinic

Call expectations: Residents are expected to follow up on patient calls and be available for patient questions, refills, or crises.

The resident will provide a variety of psychotherapeutic approaches in a longitudinal outpatient setting, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, psychodynamic therapy, brief psychotherapy, and supportive psychotherapy. Residents with full licenses may also use combined psychopharmacologic approaches. All trainees will have supervision tailored to the modality chosen for their patient.

Psychiatry Selective

Duration: 12 months

Residents choose from a very diverse array of options for this yearlong, half-day experience. Popular selectives include student mental health, child psychiatry, and primary care psychiatry.

What Residents Learn

You will explore advanced psychotherapies and study more advanced neuroscience and pharmacology. You will attend a continuous case conference, and you will likely continue your class’ training group experience through this third year.

Residents on the Research Track will continue to attend research seminars that provide an interactive format in which to learn about current research being conducted at UT Southwestern.

Balance and Diversity

As a third-year resident, you will spend one day a week at the outpatient clinic at Parkland. Here you will learn to manage acute and chronic psychiatric illness through pharmacotherapy, supportive therapy, crisis management, and systems interventions. The patient population is ethnically diverse and is challenged by socioeconomic hardship and intensive medical comorbidity. 

On another day of the week, you will attend in the UT Southwestern Psychiatry Clinic, learning intensive psychotherapy, both psychoanalytic and cognitive-behavioral, with higher functioning patients. You will co-lead a group therapy session also. Your supervision will be necessarily intensive, generally consisting of 3 hours per week with individual therapy supervisors.

You will also spend an additional half-day at either a student mental health clinic, as a consultant embedded in the Parkland Center for Internal Medicine, or at an innovative primary care clinic (PsyPCE) at the Dallas Veterans Affairs Medical Center, where you will learn to manage both medical and psychiatric issues under the supervision of internal medicine and psychiatry attending physicians.

Opportunities

For specialty training in psychosocial treatments, you will be able to choose family and couples therapy. Also, our research groups, which emphasize translational and clinical research, offer exciting opportunities for electives during the PGY3 year. 

What Makes Our Program Special

Our outpatient training is both diverse and extensively supervised. Each training site provides individual supervision, a clinical case conference, a journal club, and a didactic survey of topics relevant to the practice of outpatient psychiatry. In the Psychiatry Clinic you will be supervised by psychoanalysts and cognitive-behavioral specialists. In Parkland's outpatient clinic, our central site for learning psychopharmacology and general psychiatric management, we have attendings onsite in the clinic whose only role is to provide supervision and teaching for residents.

We are at the vanguard in providing training in the integration of psychiatry and primary care, through an array of models that include the Psychiatry Primary Care Experience, where our residents provide the entirety of their patients’ treatment – both the psychiatric as well as the primary care – and are jointly supervised by a psychiatrist and an internist.

In addition, we offer multiple elective opportunities designed to foster the development of your unique interests in psychiatry. You may also choose an elective seminar on reading fiction through a psychoanalytic lens, which is offered in the spring. 

As a resident in the Research Track, you will begin to formulate your research topics with the guidance of your primary faculty mentor and Research Track advisor.