Use of a specialty clinic to teach a standardized approach to mood disorders in a family medicine residency.

The Mood Disorder Clinic was started at the Cone Family Medicine Residency in 2004 with the threefold purpose of providing a patient care service to a largely uninsured or underinsured population; teaching Family Medicine resident physicians how to more accurately identify, diagnose, and treat mood disorders in their patients; and modeling a team-based approach to addressing mental stress, distress, and dysfunction in the primary care setting. The authors present the logistics of the clinic and the standard approach to mood issues that is taught to resident physicians. Formal feedback suggests that the resident physicians find the experience useful in developing psychiatric knowledge and skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]