Overview:
The University of Florida, College of Medicine opened in 1956 and included Child and Adolescent Psychiatry services from its inception under the direction of Dr. Henry C. Schumaker. His work as a physician was shaped by an awareness of poverty during the Depression era, nesting the earliest psychosocial framings of child developmental formulation solidly in the circumstances of child family life. Throughout leadership changes over the years we remain involved in clinical leadership and research emphasis providing attention to the developmental needs of children. We remain cognizant of the pressing needs of childhood in a complicated modern world, and with our colleagues in the Departments of Pediatrics and Psychiatry, we know we are intertwined in the challenges of healthy generativity, nurturance, and maturation in a great mandala.
We call to your attention to the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (DCAP) clinical teaching and research opportunities including training, in an academic setting fit for helping students recognize and develop their strengths and express them in their future work. Please see Dr. Ayesha Lall’s enumeration of the specific curriculum emphasized by our ACGME approved post-graduate Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Training program also posted in this site. This teaching contribution to the proficiency of our profession we believe best includes a spirit of collaboration and communication aspired to by the current faculty and fellows at the University of Florida, College of Medicine.
Clinical training utilizes local and outlying clinics, the latter now extending to UF’s newest facility at Vero Beach, Florida, which represents a burgeoning training opportunity for diagnosis, psychotherapy, and psycho-pharmacotherapy with close pediatric liaison in a state of the art facility enjoying a supportive cadre of community sponsors and participants. Closer to the medical center, the main training sites are built around core services at the Shands Vista Hospital for in-patient and partial hospitalization, the nearby and new Springhill facility for child out-patient follow-up, with onsite programming emphasing psychotherapy and family participation, and innovative child and adolescent treatment. The Springhill facility also avails for child and adolescent trainees added expertise in substance abuse and addiction, and forensic psychiatry, as they are framed around shared site adult specialized programs in pain management and transcranial magnetic stimulation. The Shands Medical Plaza facility is a main site for outpatient training in a shared setting with adult outpatient programs. The Meridian Mental Health System in its Gainesville facility provides a setting for Fellows in Child Psychiatry to learn in the community clinic setting, with particular emphasis on clinical formulation and treatment amid a web of agencies and programs which at best collaborate toward meeting the needs of children in stressed families. Dedicated advisors and mentors in that system are committed to leavening the rising loaf of experience for young child psychiatrists and envision an important mission for future synergism in helping related institutions work toward common clinical purpose, improving the plight of all our children. Our Child and Adolescent Medical Psychiatry telephone consultation service tries to help care-givers in stand-in for parent situations assure safety alongside efficacy in foster and custodial care situations. Our faculty and trainees participate in direct care to youths in juvenile justice facilities, foster care programs, school, and community programs. Through our very active Consultation-Liaison Service and Pediatric clinical settings we co-teach medical students and pediatric residents in case focused and didactic settings.
The Mcknight Brain Institute houses the imaging and bench top researchers of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Faculty are pursuing areas of clinical emphasis with research efforts including but are not limited to: autism (genetics and treatment), ADHD (epidemiology, diagnosis and treatment), OCD, Tourette’s Syndrome, post infection neuropsychiatric disorders with psychiatric presentations, anxiety disorders, substance abuse and addiction recovery. Both with clinical service and basic research, we collaborate and align with the pioneering work of the Florida Recovery Center. The McKnight Brain Institute aligns the educational programs of the psychiatry-neurology-neurosurgery axis, augmented by their molecular, genetic, developmental biological basic researchers, presenting weekly in open interdisciplinary seminars, presentations and discussions which are available to trainees who can cope with time management challenges of clinical training work. But its availability for trainees to individualize and carve out in-depth opportunity is supported by the Divisional awareness that the future of Child Psychiatry is co-rooted in neuroscience and developmental biology as well as other lenses into the socio-anthropologic forces at work in child development in society. Thus to patients and to trainees we offer outpatient services, day treatment programs, and inpatient treatment. All are grounded in trying to formulate best practices, worthwhile efficacy, and timely allocation of often too-limited resources.
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry is teamwork, and in our educational effort we self-consciously draw upon expertise from other professions including: Child Psychology, Neurology, Social Work, Applied Behavior Analysis, Pharmacy, Pharmacology, Speech and Language Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, Addictions, Recreational Therapy, other administrative case management veterans from foster care, juvenile justice, legislative interfacing, and, with devoted emphasis, Education, who we see as the experts on standards of normal. We teach and live respect for input from these viewpoints and we seek to help trainees find their own professional voice as they contribute in peer to peer team efforts with the earned central role of a child and adolescent psychiatrist.
We are an enthusiastic and growing faculty and collaborative learning fellowship with support from the State of Florida, philanthropic grants exemplified by The McCabe Foundation, and competitive funding for young faculty development attained by tenure track physicians and research specialists. Toward the development of individual research interests in faculty and students we are gifted by the sponsorship and innovation of the UF Department of Psychiatry with its Chairman, Mark Gold, M.D., and by the well-wishing, co-interested Department of Pediatrics, with its Chairman, Richard Bucciarelli, M.D., who both profoundly understand the Margaret Mead injunction that as a society we must take care of all children. Serving that global purpose is best done locally, here and now, with a visionary eye on the future of childhood.
We invite interested prospective trainees as well as professional colleagues to consider joining forces at the University of Florida. As a Division, we look forward to attending to the clinical needs of patients.
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship
The Department of Psychiatry offers residency training in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry for selected residents who have completed at least the PGY-1 year of training. ACGME approved for eight positions, our program prepares residents according to guidelines recommended by the American Academy of Child Psychiatry and by the Committee on Child Psychiatry of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. The training includes normal and abnormal child development with didactic seminars on cognitive, psychodynamic, and social and biological treatment approaches, including anatomical and biochemical studies. Supervised observations of normal children of all ages from birth through high school are provided. Clinical experiences are arranged with children and adolescents from the most severely disturbed, such as developmental disorders and central nervous system disorders, to mildly disturbed, neurotic patients. Both child psychiatry and pediatric neurology faculty provide supervision with input from clinical psychologists, neuropsychologists, speech pathologists, psychiatric nurses and other professionals.
Building on the resources of the Department of Psychiatry, the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry offers a diverse faculty, a comprehensive didactic curriculum, and modern inpatient and outpatient clinical facilities. Our program produces graduates who are clinically astute, academically well-rounded, with strong professional values and ready to assume successful leadership roles in the field.
Division Chief: Daniel Tucker, M.D.
Training Director: Ayesha Lall, M.D.
Contact Information:
Phone: (352)392-8373
Fax: (352)846-1455
Dcap@psychiatry.ufl.edu
