Global psychiatric education

Epidemiological surveys in different parts of the world have consistently converged towards the same conclusions that mental disorders are highly prevalent, exact high direct and indirect health care costs, and are mostly undetected and untreated. Mental health literacy, stigma towards mental health care issues, and lack of knowledge and skills among healthcare professionals in identifying and managing common mental disorders are commonly cited as reasons for the large unmet needs in global mental health (Andrade et al., 2014). Psychiatrists play a key role in promoting public mental health awareness, fighting stigma against mental health problems, and equipping health professionals with the knowledge and skills in identifying and managing mental disorders. One most important strategy to enhance the number of psychiatrists in each country is to enhance recruitment of medical graduates into psychiatry. World Psychiatric Association (WPA) has recently released a position statement that highlights the key strategies to enhance medical students’ interest in psychiatry (Shields et al., 2017). However, having an adequate workforce of psychiatrists is not enough per se, as every country needs high quality psychiatric workforce. As such, it is very important that psychiatrists should be adequately trained to possess a set of core competencies to execute the various roles expected for a psychiatrist in the modern world. WPA again has released a position statement that details the attitudes, skills and knowledge that a psychiatrist should possess in order to become a competent clinician, an effective communicator, a good researcher and a passionate public mental health advocate (Bhugra et al., 2016). As a further elaboration of these attributes in the form of postgraduate psychiatric curriculum, WPA has released an official document detailing a set of core competencies for a trained psychiatrist that member societies are best to strive for when developing their own national training curricula for their psychiatrists (Belfort et al., 2017). While these core competencies can be described as the backbone of a good training structure, different countries still have different ways of training their psychiatrists due to their diverse political, historical, cultural and economic underpinnings. In this Special Edition, the readers can appreciate the marked differences in the training system for psychiatrists in different parts of the world, as well as their emphases on different elements of a set of core competencies based on local needs and constraints. Although some countries might appear to be less resourceful than other countries in terms of investment into training psychiatrists, the readers will appreciate how innovation adopted in less resourceful countries can enhance the training experience and expertise of their trainee psychiatrists. Reading this Special Issue will illustrate how different countries strive to grooming psychiatrists who are fulfilling the roles and responsibilities as stipulated in another two recent WPA position statements (Bhugra et al., 2015a, 2015b). This Special Issue also aims to stimulate our readers’ interests in appreciating the commonalities and diversities of training systems in different countries, as well as reflecting how their own training systems can be enhanced by borrowing innovative concepts from the countries covered in this Special Issue.