Teaching psychotherapy in a group therapy setting : current perspectives

Abstract EN

Graduate psychiatric training in the United States and in other industrialized nations such as Canada, England, and Germany is currently undergoing a major transformation.

As a paramount expression of these changes, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has recently began to require that all modalities of psychotherapy be taught in all of their accredited graduate training programs in psychiatry in this country.

In a parallel fashion, the current managed care influences as well as the current strives toward evidence-based medicine have pressured graduate training programs, including psychiatry, to provide services in the most cost-effective manner.

In this context, a group therapy program was designed and developed in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston since the early 1990s.

This permitted the training of psychiatric residents in a psychotherapeutic setting that can also provide high quality of psychiatric care in a cost-effective basis.

We hope that in addressing the experiences ascertained in this training program during the last ten years, other graduate training programs in psychiatry across this country could learn from our experiences and thus consider utilizing this training and service model in their attempts to comply with today's ACGME expectations within a managed-care environment.