Curriculum

Our curriculum offers robust experiences throughout the Mount Sinai Health System, allowing trainees to define areas of concentration and develop expertise that will form a foundation as you develop into leaders in clinical practice, research, teaching, and administration.

Innovative and forward thinking, our redesigned program represents a shift in focus from inpatient to outpatient rotations to reflect the changing practice of psychiatry. Through our maximizing the ratio of educational opportunities to service-delivery, incorporating substantial elective time in multiple settings across multiple years, we offer a focus on individualization and academic sub-specialization as well as broad opportunities for longitudinal research and clinical care with active mentorship. 

A Four Year Experience

The richness of the educational experience at Mount Sinai prepares you to become a skilled academic clinician, talented educator, productive researcher, and dynamic contributor to the future of psychiatry. We maintain a significant exposure to an exceptionally diverse patient population across ethnic, socioeconomic, gender, age, and diagnostic categories, as well as an experience of training under personable, accessible faculty with national expertise in subspecialty areas. 

View a sample 4-year rotation schedule.

The first year in residency is focused on helping you learn the basic skills of being a practicing physician, including the requisite medical knowledge and how to work with acutely ill patients while having a wealth of contact with attendings and senior residents. Non-psychiatric rotations include inpatient internal medicine (and/or pediatrics), outpatient internal medicine, emergency medicine, inpatient neurology, neuroradiology, and outpatient and/or consult neurology. Psychiatry experiences include inpatient adult, inpatient child/adolescent, inpatient forensic, inpatient veteran’s, and inpatient geriatric rotations.

We have arranged all rotations in an inter-digitated schedule to allow all residents a mix of medicine and psychiatry early on and throughout the year.

On-Call, consisting of short-call and night-float, entails covering the inpatient psychiatric units and working with the PGY-3 and attending in the psychiatry emergency service.

Our thrice-weekly noon-time didactics program is attended by our residents rotating on both psychiatric and non-psychiatric services. We believe this promotes greater class cohesion and augments both the personal and educational experiences of the intern year.

PGY-1 residents also attend multiple case conferences and clinical seminars, including a twice-weekly morning report run by the Chief Residents, weekly Formulation Rounds, Chairman’s Rounds, Grand Rounds, and additional unit and service-specific educational events.

Learn more about the PGY-1 psychiatry resident's weekly schedule

During your second year, you solidify knowledge of inpatient psychiatry, round out clinical experiences in a multitude of settings, develop core outpatient skills for third year independence, and begin considering areas of psychiatry in which to specialize. In our redesigned curriculum, we have reduced the number of total inpatient months from 13 down to 7-8, in keeping with the changing practice of how psychiatric services are provided.

Our PGY-2 residents have a six-month-long, full-time outpatient experience, including substance use and geriatric psychiatry at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center, focusing on new evaluations, sub-acute stabilization, extended treatment, and training in crisis management and targeted psychopharmacology and psychotherapies. This is augmented by one day per week of outpatient electives at The Mount Sinai Hospital.

The other six months include rotations on our psychiatric emergency service, inpatient psychiatry units (including training in ECT), consultation-liaison, and partial hospital program.

On-Call is at the VA, with attending back-up available by phone throughout the night. This experience provides an opportunity for expanded responsibilities and professional growth, as residents cover the inpatient psychiatry service and provide consultation services to the ER and to the general medical/surgical floors.

Didactics consists of 6-7 hours of protected time during one day each week.

PGY-2 residents also attend multiple case conferences and clinical seminars, including weekly Formulation Rounds, Chairman’s Rounds, Grand Rounds, and additional unit and service-specific educational events.

The PGY-3 experience continues residents’ immersion in outpatient psychiatry, where formal training and supervision in the overall management and long-term care of outpatients is combined with additional experiences in specialty areas of psychiatry and elective time, allowing for a greater diversity of population, illness, treatment modality, evaluation style, systems-based practice, and supervision.

In addition to providing individual treatment to patients under close supervision in the Resident Training Clinic, residents work with leading experts in our specialty care clinics (e.g., schizophrenia, treatment-resistant depression, interventional psychiatry, personality disorders, OCD). Residents learn a wide variety of psychopharmacological interventions and receive extensive clinical training in CBT, psychodynamic, and supportive psychotherapies, with supervision by senior psychotherapists, including through Mount Sinai’s formal affiliation with the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. In addition, residents run groups, evaluate and treat children and adolescents, and have the opportunity to work in ambulatory med/pers/surg settings in outpatient consultation-liaison.

PGY-3s have 15% elective time to define and pursue a concentrated focus (i.e., your “major”). Electives may be based in clinical, research, teaching, or administrative settings, and may also include additional psychotherapeutic modalities.

On-Call is in the psychiatric emergency service, which is staffed by a supervisory attending psychiatrist 24/7.

As in other years, PGY-3 residents are given protected time for their classroom didactic curriculum, representing 5 hours one-day per week. This year prioritizes a focus on the different psychotherapies and outpatient psychopharmacology.

Mentored training and academic work in individualized area(s) form the core of the fourth year, as residents cultivate developing expertise and readiness for independent psychiatric practice and directed professional growth.

Alongside their substantial elective time, residents continue to treat under supervision selected outpatients in a longitudinal manner, advancing their psychotherapeutic and psychopharmacological skills. The fourth year also includes a month in our Partial Hospital Program, in which senior residents run groups, supervise junior residents and non-physician practitioners, and further consolidate their skills. 

We believe all residents should develop the teaching ability to become future leaders in psychiatry. To cultivate these skills and to further prepare senior residents for life after residency, each PGY-4 acts as a Junior Teaching Attending assigned to a clinical service, teaching, advising, mentoring, and supervising PGY-1s and 2s. 

There is no On-Call in PGY-4.

As in other years, PGY-4 residents are given protected time for their classroom didactic curriculum, representing six hours one-day per week. In addition to learning more nuanced techniques in psychotherapy, advanced psychopharmacology, and translating neuroscience into the clinical realm, the classroom curriculum addressed real-world issues like negotiating for jobs and initiating one’s career post-residency.