Undergraduate Training in Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences—the Need to Train the Trainers

There is general agreement among Mental Health professionals, that undergraduate training in Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences in most of the medical colleges in the country is unsatisfactory. Some of the reasons advanced for this unfortunate situation are :—insufficient teachinghours, inadequate staff, lack of interest on the part of students and our non-psychiatrist medical colleagues, absence of provision for examination in the subjects, ambiguity and controversy surrounding many psychiatric concepts and practices, lack of access to sophisticated audio-visual teaching aids etc. While there is no denying that these inadequacies have to be corrected, we should also look for more basic causes. A look at the problem in the world-context reveals, that, even in the more developed countries, with generous hours allotted to the teaching of the subjects during the undergraduate years, availability of adequate staff and the latest teaching aids, the extent to which the psycho-social dimension is assessed in patient-evaluation by medical students leaves a lot to be desired. James and Galletly (1982) found, for example, that though the undergraduate medical students at Otago University, New Zealand, have as many as 160 hours devoted to the teaching of Psychological Medicine, little dfference was found in the extent to which psychological data were recorded in two samples of General Hospital case-notes written 10 years apart, inspite of a significant increase of apparently relevant material taught in the same 10 years period. Burroughs (1978) also noted under-recording of psychological and social factors, as compared to the routine aspects of physical care, in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Canada. Ruff and Mechanik (1975) found that students tended to categorise patients according to the department in which they were first seen so that the same student who demonstrated psychological awareness in psychiatry gave little evidence of it in General Medicine, suffering that the skills acquired in the psychiatric wards do not generalise to the medical wards.