Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) during 3rd Year Psychiatry Clerkships: Development of a Pilot Program at VCU School of Medicine
By Jean Wu, M3
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA
Over the last few years since the COVID-19 pandemic, our country has recognized the importance of mental health. There has been a tremendous growth in demand for mental healthcare providers, including psychiatrists. Yet, psychiatry has historically been a less popular specialty in medical school. We (Angela Liu PGY1, Dr. Kathyrn Jones, and Jean Wu, M3) created the ACT experience in hopes of a larger goal of encouraging more medical students to pursue a career in psychiatry through humanizing severe mental illnesses.
Psychiatry is uniquely distinguished from other fields of medicine in that we try to understand the patient as a complete person. We consider all the elements of being a person – millions of years of human existence culminating in a unique genetic code, situations and interactions that shape one’s understanding of self and others, and all the social-cultural-environmental factors that form the soil for a person’s development. This is a key learning point for medical students during their psychiatry clerkship. However, much of core clerkships focuses on the hospital environment, only a small sliver of a patient’s life.
As a member of the International/Inner City/Rural Preceptorship (I2CRP) program at VCU, I have always valued community health and actively seek opportunities to understand the socio-environmental factors that influence disease. My interest in community psychiatry led me to reach out to the ACT team at Chesterfield Mental Health Support Services during my M2 year. There, I met patients with severe mental illness in their homes, and through that experience, I learned there was a difference between understanding versus actually experiencing the biopsychosocial factors that influence mental illness. And I wanted to share this unique and valuable learning experience with my peers when we approached our M3 clerkships.
While the ACT experience at VCU is still a relatively new program, the reviews from my peers, and response from this conference, have been hopeful. Ultimately, we hope this project can inspire other medical students nationally to create similar programs at their schools. Angela Liu PGY1, Dr. Kathyrn Jones, and I are honored to have received this recognition.
