Using Mental Health Podcasts for Public Education
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MEDIA COLUMN
Using Mental Health Podcasts for Public Education Cheryl D. Wills 1 Received: 30 January 2020 / Accepted: 17 June 2020 # Academic Psychiatry 2020
Advances in medical and technological knowledge have changed psychiatry graduate medical education. Residents are required to learn and apply volumes of complex information and to become proficient in clinical service delivery to meet the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) core competency requirements in psychiatry [1]. The information gleaned from didactic education, supervision, reading, observation, practicing, collaborative communication, and other education modalities facilitates building and refining a skillset that is a prerequisite for independent practice [2]. Unfortunately, the growing body of professional resources, including medical literature, makes it challenging, at best, to produce well-rounded physician/ scholars in an increasingly complex society. The psychiatry Residency Training Director is challenged with the task of crafting a training experience that treats education requirements equitably. She prioritizes training opportunities and refines the didactics curriculum and other educational modalities to offer residents a quality and balanced time-limited training experience that meets ACGME standards. This is an onerous task given the growing volume of available educational resources, clinical need, and related opportunities. Consequently, some sectors of required psychiatric education that may merit additional attention may be overlooked [1]. One such area involves training psychiatric residents to function as advocates for the profession and their patients. Residents can refine their communication skills by reaching out to and educating the public about mental health—including emotional wellness, the mental health system, psychiatric assessment and treatment, destigmatizing mental illness, and access to care—in greater detail than what is available in medical office brochures and public service announcements.
* Cheryl D. Wills [email protected] 1
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
One way to accomplish this involves empowering psychiatry residents to use critical thinking skills to identify lowcost, high-quality mental health educational materials that may appeal to the public. This requires residents to use a dispassionate, evidence-informed, and systematic approach to examining publicly accessible mental health resources. Though the Internet offers access to various forms of media, an Internet audio podcast program—an episodic series of serial recordings that are accessible by downloading their digital files—was used for the project because the recordings can be listened to on many types of electronic devices (computers, smartphones, tablets, MP3 players, automobile stereos, compact disk players, etc.), accessed in many settings, listened to while multitasking and replayed, or in some cases bookmarked, so that the user will be able to review specific segments if desired. Additional
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