Psychiatry 2500-EN-PS-CS4-01

The course will introduce the students into psychiatry as a subdivision of modern medicine, a specialty dealing with diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders. There will be discussed major groups of psychiatric disorders, namely anxiety disorders, affective disorders, eating disorders, sleep disorders, sexual disorders, schizophrenia and related psychoses, disorders due to substance misuse, personality disorders, impulse-control disorders will be discussed in terms of epidemiology, etiological theories and hypotheses, clinical manifestations and categories, differential diagnosis including symptoms overlapping, differentiation with somatic conditions, course, prognosis and
management, specific features in different age groups (children and adolescents, elderly patients).

In each class students will become familiar with most important
issues concerning a specific topic. Discussion on presented clinical examples will help incorporate obtained knowledge into understanding the nature of patients’ problems . Students will learn the psychiatric evaluation and to become more confident in decision-making (developing treatment plans, referring patients to specialist care, etc.).

A lecture at the end of the course will be dedicated to additional
topics (like transcultural psychiatry, evolutionary perspective in
psychiatry, methods of treatment, etc), to an in-depth approach to previously discussed problems or to a trial test – depending on the students’ choice.

Students will be asked to prepare for each class by reading
specified chapters from the literature (assigned from class to class) and their active participation (questions, doubts). The discussion will be encouraged. Three times during the course students will be asked to prepare a written case study.