Message from the Director of Medical Student Education

The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences contributes to all four years of SUNY Downstate medical students' education. Our faculty and residents are educators, mentors and role models in education, research, and clinical services.

During Foundations of Medicine, lectures and small group experiences lead students in an exploration of psychiatric illness from a biopsychosocial perspective. During the Psychiatry Clerkship, our faculty and residents supervise students in hands on clinical care of patients at our valued teaching sites: Downstate, Kings County Medical Center, Maimonides Medical Center, Brookdale Hospital, Lenox Hill Hospital, and Kingsboro Psychiatric Center. The clerkship experience is highly rated by students and offers a rigorous exposure to psychiatric care sensitively delivered to the populations we serve.

Fourth year electives are offered primarily at Kings County Medical Center (and Downstate) in Inpatient, Consultation Liaison, Child Psychiatry, Chemical Dependency, Partial Hospitalization Program, and Psychiatric Emergency Services.

Faculty serve an additional and invaluable role to students as research mentors and we take pride in providing these opportunities to students. Research opportunities exist in Geriatric Psychiatry, Child/Adolescent Psychiatry, Consultation/Liasion Psychiatry, Genetics of Psychiatric Illness, and the Biology of Psychiatric Illness.

Psychiatry has become an increasingly popular specialty choice nationally and at Downstate. We offer extensive and continuous guidance throughout the third and fourth years to help those students applying to Psychiatry.

We are drawn to the compelling questions posed by mental illness as well as the opportunity to contribute substantively to patients’ well-being. In no other specialty does the physician gain a more complete understanding of the patient, and, therefore, have the necessary knowledge to make specific targeted biopsychosocial interventions.

Jeffrey Feola, MD
Director, Medical Student Education in Psychiatry

Daniel Friedman, MD

Carlo Paolo Crucero • Psychiatry.Clerkship@downstate.edu
Medical Student Coordinator

718-270-3224

718-270-4617 FAX