Overview

The Department of Psychiatry offers a fully accredited, four-year residency training program with a total of 36 positions. It is an academic program with clinical work balanced by an extensive teaching schedule.

Our residents come with a diverse set of past experiences and I am always amazed at what a cohesive group we are.”  – Suzanne Eschenbach,      former resident

The Maimonides faculty consists of over 30
board-certified psychiatrists who work closely with psychologists, psychiatric nurses and social workers. During any given period, 36 residents are in training. Every year, eight to ten positions are offered. The hospital serves a uniquely multi-cultural and multi-ethnic community, and the residents’ own backgrounds reflect this diversity.

Maimonides Medical Center has developed an outstanding reputation for multi-disciplinary psychiatric care. The Department of Psychiatry, which simultaneously treats and teaches, consists of multiple divisions:

• Community Mental Health Center Inpatient Unit and the Jane B. Aron Pavilion provide a total of 70 beds for the treatment of the acutely mentally ill.
• Adult Outpatient Services (AOS) offer psycho-pharmacological and psychotherapeutic treatment to patients who are able to function as part of the community. Patients are seen by therapists as needed and are encouraged to attend regular group therapies.
• Wellness Recovery Program (WRP) provides day care to patients who do not require hospitalization, but who need more intensive treatment than can be provided in outpatient visits. Subdivisions of W.R.P. address the needs of geriatric patients struggling with dementia and the Latino community whose primary language is Spanish.
• Developmental Disabilities Clinic, Brooklyn’s largest outpatient facility for treating the mentally retarded, provides multiple services to its patients and their families. Patients receive pharmacotherapy, individual, group and family therapy.
• Child and Adolescent Outpatient Services (CAOS) offers outpatient treatment to children in need of psychiatric care. Teams of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers work together to help parents meet the needs of their children. The Clinic also treats children with behavioral and learning difficulties.
• Consultation-Liaison Service (CEPS) brings psychiatric expertise to the medical and surgical units.
• Primary Care Clinic offers residents in their first year the opportunity to fine tune their medical skills and knowledge as it applies to psychiatric patients. Residents will perform medical evaluations and procedures on inpatient psychiatric units and in the outpatient medical clinic, which is geared toward patients with mental illness. Residents become more proficient in learning about medical problems that commonly affect psychiatric patients including the  metabolic syndrome, EKG changes, nicotine addiction, and also how to get and keep patients engaged in treatment.
• Outreach programs offer both psychiatric and social services to neighborhoods around the medical center. Many of these programs have been honored. FACES, a teenage improvisational theater, presents to schools and other institutions dramatizations of problems faced by today’s young people.
• Psychiatry Emergency Room rotation offers residents of all training years the opportunity to complete full psychiatric evaluations on patients in an acute setting under the direct supervision of an attending 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Evaluations are done in the main ER, as well as in our state-of-the-art psychiatric ER. The resident will learn how to manage acute psychiatric emergencies as part of an interdisciplinary team consisting of an ER attending, psychiatry attending, nurses, social workers, and mental care health workers.