Tools to facilitate the teaching and enhance the practice of psychopharmacology

摘要

The last three decades have witnessed an explosion in our neuro-scientific and psychological understanding of mental disorders, as well as their acute and longer-term treatment. The challenge - which has been growing given these multiple advances - is how to bring this new, clinically-important and ever evolving information and knowledge to teachers and practitioners. Historically, efforts of ambitious individuals who have focused on a specialized area of knowledge has led to the development of individual lectures that may or may not be updated or shared. This effort, while heroic, is less efficient and risks an uneven curriculum even if one could bring all these lectures together (Glick et al., 2007; Salzman and Glick, 2015). This challenge, both in Asia and world-wide, has begun to be addressed by efforts that date back now more than two decades by the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and more recently by the American Society of Psychopharmacology. Through collaborations among major clinical researchers (and teachers) largely in the U.S., these organizations have produced and evolved a curriculum designed for psychopharmacology teachers that is regularly up-dated and that addresses a broad range of topics, that are germaine to the state of the art and practice of psychopharmacology (Glick et al., 2014). The curriculum comprises approximately 4500 slides divided into over 90 lectures, that can be shaped to address the learning needs of medical students, residents, fellows as well as practitioners in primary as well as specialty care (Glick et al., 2015).