Making It Real: From Telling to Showing, Sharing, and Doing in Psychiatric Education

Figures & data

Table 1 Matrix of Two Theoretical Frameworks Applied to Psychiatric Education

	Location Showing: Asynchronous Clinical Materials	Identity Sharing: Lived Experience	Power Doing: Co-Constructive Patient Simulation
Safety	● Abiding by best practices for simulated patients ● Paying special attention to the hiring of underage actors ● Respecting patients’ decision to participate or decline ● Paying attention to dual agency by separating clinical from educational agendas ● Ensuring ability to provide informed consent	● Social contact between individuals with and without mental illnesses is the most effective destigmatizing intervention in psychiatry ● Providing non-judgmental listening and unconditional support to those sharing generously ● Ensuring the confidentiality of all participants	● CCPS is a novel medical education approach that provides a participatory alternative to traditional supervision and training ● Learning objectives are set by learners, informed by topics difficult to openly talk about ● Experiencing the clinical struggles and challenges of peers—and one’s own—in an open and emotionally secure space
Intentionality	● Embedding materials that showcase clinical realities requires buy-in from instructors and curriculum developers ● Destigmatizing patients by humanizing the “face” of mental illnesses	● Deciding to acknowledge vulnerabilities requires a deliberate act of bravery ● Destigmatizing providers by addressing maladaptive perfectionism through a showcasing of the mental health challenges and human fallibility of clinicians ● Addressing self-stigma ● Modeling self-compassion	● “Making” time where it is impossible to “find” it demands programmatic and personal commitment ● Destigmatizing psychiatry by exporting the field’s expertise to other specialties and healthcare disciplines
Liminality	● Simulated patients are professional actors who inhabit scripts to embody the lives of real patients ● Committing to authentic representation ● Opening the “black box” of the “room where it happens”	● In offering their whole selves, providers leave the comfort of their outwardly curated professional personas ● In publicly owning their experience as patients, providers blur the boundaries between their two “roles”	● Participants are at critical transition points in their professional development ● Videoconferencing and other web-based means offer hitherto unimaginable experiences that permit interactivity in real time across sites, distances, and time zones

Figure 1 Two combined frameworks applied to psychiatric education.

Notes: All capitals: constructs derived from reference ⁸; underline: constructs derived from reference ¹⁵; Italics: three applied examples.

Bleakley A, Bligh J, Browne J. Medical Education for the Future: Identity, Power and Location. Netherlands: Springer; 2012.

 Google Scholar

Kumagai AK, Naidu T. Reflection, dialogue, and the possibilities of space. Acad Med. 2015;90(3):283–288. doi:10.1097/ACM.0000000000000582

 PubMed Web of Science ®Google Scholar