Greetings

We are very pleased that you are beginning your search for a career in psychiatry, and that you have come seeking information about Mount Sinai's programs. (Please note that on these pages, you will find information specific to our general adult Psychiatry Residency Program only. For our Triple Board Program, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship, and the other Mount Sinai Psychiatry fellowships, please go back to the education page.)

We consider psychiatry to be the most interesting and challenging specialty in medicine, charged with caring for those who otherwise would lead troubled lives, with risk of exclusion, isolation and suicide. These illnesses result from complex pathways involving genetic predispositions, the development of mind, cognitive-behavioral traits, personal meanings, and interactions with the multifaceted social and material environment. We now have potent treatments that are constantly being refined. Our psychotherapies, pharmacotherapies, and other biological treatments can literally give life back to our patients. Since our focus is on inner, subjective experiences – thoughts, emotions, hopes, memories, and self-reflections – we are privileged to know our patients in ways that lead to a deep and fulfilling sense of connection.

We also regard psychiatric education as a great challenge and responsibility. Our aim is to teach residents to arrive carefully at diagnoses by establishing rapport and interviewing in ways that help patients reveal their painful inner lives. We want to prepare you to understand and treat the many different conditions that are grouped as mental disorders. Though some might differentiate them from medical disorders, at Mount Sinai we do not. We want residents to know how behavior and mental events are linked to that amazing organ – the brain. We have wonderful partners in the neurosciences, now focused on studying the higher functions (e.g., memories, emotions, decision making) which are often dysregulated in our patients. We now have the capability to measure brain function in patients both when they are ill and well. We can begin to construct theories of how vulnerabilities develop and how life events and treatments can interact in protective as well as adverse ways.

At Mount Sinai we are very aware that our program has an ulterior as well as an educational responsibility: To prepare you for a career. We want all residents to gain the knowledge base and clinical skills to practice clinical psychiatry, but we aim for more than that. As in your university studies, we will encourage you to find an area of concentration. We aim for you to graduate with a valid sense of expertise that will merit you a position of distinction when you go on to further training, clinical practice, research or a teaching/administrative position.

Our residency programs are mostly located at two major centers, The Mount Sinai Medical Center and the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center. The two locations prepare residents to manage psychiatric disorders in patients from exceptionally diverse socioeconomic and ethnic groups; included in this population are returning veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our research programs are similarly broad-based and open to resident participation. Our department is recognized internationally for its groundbreaking achievements in psychiatric research, and our research faculty members provide expert didactic teaching and new clinical treatments. At the same time, our formal affiliation with the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute—the oldest and largest psychoanalytic organization in the United States – allows us to offer unparalleled training in the psychotherapies and access to faculty and teachers of the highest caliber.

We strive to provide an open, stimulating, and supportive environment for our residents. Residency education involves hard work, but there is joy and excitement in becoming a psychiatrist, and we aim for these years to be professionally productive and personally fulfilling. Again, welcome to Mount Sinai. We look forward to sharing our enthusiasm about the Mount Sinai Residency Program in Psychiatry with you.