Undergraduate Education


Dr. Aturan Shanmugalingam

 Welcome to the Department of Psychiatry at Western University. We serve our communities’ mental health needs, advance innovation, and foster life-long learning through advancing a culture of collaboration, excellence, and compassion that is infused with meaning and joy. We strive for the creation and application of leading-edge educational methods and a rich environment of knowledge exchange and transfer among faculty, trainees, patients, families, and the larger academic and regional communities. We provide a full spectrum of education experience in Psychiatry. Undergraduate teaching in our department focuses on highlighting the significance of biopsychosocial factors in normal human development and in illness, enabling students to recognize common psychiatric disorders and how to treat these disorders within their competence using recovery-based principles.

We have several outstanding people and programs that make our department such an exciting place. In addition to a robust undergraduate psychiatry curriculum, we have psychiatrists leading other major educational portfolios such as the Academic Coaching Program by Dr. Priya Subramanian. Thanks to our excellent faculty and resident educators, we have seen a steady and steep interest in students choosing Psychiatry as a rewarding career choice.

The 4-year program is divided into the following:

Year 1

Foundations Course: This is part of the Principles of Medicine I curriculum with Psychiatry and behavioral science cases integrated in Foundations course with a focus on ‘how to think like a physician?’

Year 2

Principles of Medicine II: which integrates foundational and clinical sciences in psychiatry with learning related to social determinants of health and social accountability, while establishing competence to enter clinical bedside learning,
Transition to Clerkship Course: Using 4 psychiatric cases, students will be assessed for early clinical competency while expanding their decision-making in seminar or small group multi-system or theme based learning.
Clinical Skills Course: Using a patient-centred approach instruction is given in psychiatric interviewing and mental status examination. Clinical reasoning and decision making is explored through the Problem-Orientated Clinical Record.

Year 3

Clerkship: Under the supervision of faculty and senior residents, clerks are given graded responsibility in the diagnosis, investigation, and management of psychiatric patients in hospital, clinic and outpatient settings.

Year 4

Beginning in Year 4, Electives can be arranged by students in Psychiatry. After completion of the Clinical Electives, students return to campus in January for Integration and Transition which permits students to further integrate the basic and clinical aspects of synthesized with their clinical experience.

For further information, please contact us
Aturan.Shanmugalingam@sjhc.london.on.ca

ugepsychiatry@lhsc.on.ca