Didactics | Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship | UC Davis Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

This seminar offers a strong foundation for working with children and adolescents in clinical settings. Fellows gain essential principles, practical skills, and a working knowledge base to support their development as clinicians.

Core topics include:

• Ethical issues in working with children and families
• Mandated reporting requirements
• Models of child and adolescent development
• Psychopharmacology in pediatric populations
• Approaches to family treatment
• Accessing and critically evaluating psychiatric literature
• Biopsychosocial-developmental case formulation

Throughout the seminar, special emphasis is placed on developmental considerations in interviewing, observation, assessment, and treatment. Content may vary from year to year based on emerging topics and training needs.

This seminar provides fellows knowledge requisite to understanding typical and atypical early child development.

Core topics include:

• Theories of early child development and skills in assessment
• Structured and unstructured clinical diagnostic methods 
• Biopsychosocial methods of treatment 

This seminar often includes live observation of young children in the context of dyadic relationships, and clinical and childcare settings. Attachment disturbances, feeding disorders, sleeping disorders, and other psychopathologic conditions affecting young children are addressed.

Fellows develop and share their own hypothetical research projects.

Core topics include:

• Development of a testable hypothesis
• Sample population and assessment measures
• Exposure to the process of seeking funding
• Statistical methods for interpretation of results
• Skills in writing for publication

This seminar familiarizes fellows with the scientific and cultural literature, and best practices for assessing and treating children from 6-12 years of age with psychiatric symptoms.

Core topics include:

• The continuum of normal development in middle childhood
• Major psychiatric syndromes seen in middle childhood (including ADHD, learning disorders, anxiety disorders, mood disorders, etc.)
• Treatment planning, modalities and evaluation of outcomes

Live observation in academic and clinical settings is included. Memoirs and film are used as springboards for discussion.

This seminar focuses on typical and pathological adolescent psychosocial development and includes fieldtrips to relevant clinical and research settings.

Core topics include:

• Data use and case formulation
• Intervention best practices
• Psychiatric disorders that may present during adolescence (e.g. eating and substance use, schizophrenia, conduct).

In this seminar, emphasis is placed on case-based work, including live observation of clinical work.

Core topics include:

• Family dynamics
• Techniques of effective intervention

Core topics include:

• Principles of consultation 
• Issues regarding child psychiatric consultation to schools, juvenile court, and within pediatric settings

This seminar focuses on psychotherapeutic issues unique to child and adolescent work.

Core topics include:

• Play
• Countertransference
• Beginning and ending treatment
• Working with parents

This course provides fellows with an understanding of the drug development and clinical trials process for medications used to treat childhood mental disorders.

Core topics include:

• Identifying potential medication targets, including neuromodulators, neuroanatomical sites, and genes
• Drug classes commonly used in the treatment of child and adolescent mental disorders
• Integration of psychopharmacologic treatment with other treatment modalities
• Issues pertaining to compliance
• Ethical and safety issues in the prescribing of psychotropic medications

This course provides fellows an opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to sensitively assess and treat children, adolescents, and families whose cultural and social backgrounds may differ from those of the fellow.

Core topics include:

• Understanding cultural differences and their impact on child development
• The physician-patient relationship
• Adherence to treatment
• Exploration of new attitudes based on self-awareness
• Development of skills in the lifelong acquisition of cultural competence

This seminar focuses on the assessment, diagnosis, course, treatment, neurobiology, and presentation of neurodevelopmental disorders, with particular emphasis placed on the pervasive developmental disorders spectrum.

In this seminar, led by a child psychiatrist/psychoanalyst, fellows present and discuss ongoing psychotherapy cases. Emphasis is placed upon psychodynamic formulation of cases and utilizing techniques of psychodynamically-informed psychotherapy.

This mini course is focused on helping to prepare fellows for the child and adolescent psychiatry board exam.