Learning Tools for Medical Students on Psychiatry Rotation

Most students arrive on a psychiatry rotation with the same questions: How do I structure an intake interview that I have never done before? Which symptoms am I supposed to be screening for? What do I write in the progress note tomorrow morning? And how do I avoid missing something dangerous? This chapter is a survival kit. It points to the chapters and printable forms you should have open during the first week, walks through the small handful of mnemonics that will carry most of your screening questions, and ends with a list of clinical situations where the right response is to stop interviewing and call your senior.

How to use this site as a med student

PsychoPharmRef is organized so you can find a specific clinical question quickly. The three sections you will use most often:

• Chapters — long-form reviews on individual disorders, classes of medications, and clinical workflows. The companion chapter Recommended Chapters for Medical Students is an annotated reading list of the highest-yield 16 to start with.
• Clinical Tools — interactive scoring versions of common rating scales (PHQ-9 by way of SIGECAPS, YMRS, PCL-5, AIMS, BFCRS for catatonia, C-SSRS for suicide risk, and so on). Each tool generates a paste-ready note for your EMR.
• Printable Forms — one-page blank versions of the same scales, plus the new one-page Psychiatric History & MSE and Psychiatric SOAP Follow-up sheets you can carry on rounds. Print a stack at the start of your rotation.

Mnemonics that do most of the work

Three mnemonics will get you through the bulk of inpatient and outpatient screening. Memorize them in week one. They map directly onto DSM-5-TR criteria, so when you list off the symptoms during your presentation you are also walking the team through the diagnostic threshold.

Printable forms for rounding

The rotations where students perform best are the ones where they walk in with structure. Two new one-page forms were built specifically for the medicine clerkship style of rounding, where you have ten minutes between patients and need to capture an intake or follow-up cleanly.

The other forms students reach for most often: PHQ-9, GAD-7, CIWA-Ar, COWS, AIMS, MoCA/SLUMS, and the C-SSRS for any patient endorsing suicidal ideation. Print a small stack of each before your rotation begins; they take up less space than a clipboard and they make presentations crisper.

Things to watch out for — psychiatric red flags

The psychiatric emergencies below are the ones where a delay in recognition causes harm. Each is covered in depth in Emergency Psychiatry: Assessment and Management of Acute Crises and in the disorder-specific chapters; the goal here is to make the warning signs sticky enough that you flag them out loud during rounds.

How to study during your rotation

The single highest-yield habit on a psychiatry rotation is to read about a disorder the same evening you see it. That night-of consolidation is what cements the link between the patient you just interviewed and the criteria, neurobiology, and pharmacology in your reading. Use the Recommended Chapters for Med Students as your reading list. The chapter on The Science of Learning walks through the spaced-retrieval and interleaved-practice approaches that have the strongest evidence in medical education.

A few small things compound: keep an index card in your white-coat pocket with the three mnemonics above; ask one question every interview that you would not have asked yesterday; and present every patient to your senior with a one-line formulation rather than a chronological narrative. By the end of the rotation those small habits become the difference between students who say "I rotated through psychiatry" and students who learned how to think psychiatrically about every patient they will see for the rest of their careers.

Key takeaways

• Print a stack of one-page forms before your first day — the H&P quadrant sheet, SOAP follow-up sheet, PHQ-9, GAD-7, CIWA-Ar, COWS, and C-SSRS.
• Memorize SIGECAPS (depression), DIGFAST (mania), and SAD PERSONS (suicide risk). They map onto DSM criteria and onto your differential.
• Use the recommended chapter list to plan your reading; align each evening's reading with the patients you saw that day.
• Memorize the red-flag list above — serotonin syndrome, NMS, lithium toxicity, TCA overdose, DTs, acute dystonia, hypertensive crisis, catatonia, medication-induced SI. These are the situations where stopping the interview to call your senior is the right answer.
• Ask before assuming: consult psychiatry isn't reluctant to help. The question "is this delirium or is this dementia or is this depression?" is asked five times a week on any inpatient medicine service, and the right answer is usually all three at once.