About PsychSkills.co.uk

This site is for the student doctor starting a psychiatry firm. It aims to help you acquire the clinical skills needed to be competent in psychiatry. Having sound knowledge of the disorders you will encounter is essential to any clinical practice - this site won’t teach you that (...but ICD-10 is a good place to start)

PsychSkills can help you with the approaches to interviewing, history taking, examining, documenting and diagnosing (the common disorders) in psychiatry. The layouts used in this site are the same as those used in most UK undergraduate textbooks of psychiatry and hence by most psychiatrists in the UK.

All the diagnostic criteria for the mental disorders is based on ICD-10 and so all the diagnostic interview questions in the diagnosis section are based on this as well.

The aim is to produce the site in a digestible format as it is mainly aimed at the beginner. Whenever new psychiatric vocabulary is used throughout the site a link is made either to the psychiatric dictionary or to an external web definition. All history and mental state examination sections are illustrated with example patient note documentation and tips to give you an idea of styles of writing up clerkings.

Before you venture out into the harsh reality of the wards and clinics you can print off a copy of the free PocketBook to serve as a handy aide memoire for those early days hopefully making your transition to clinical psychiatry as seamless as possible.

A. S. Hassan
(Author, St Georges, London)

Special thanks to Dr. F Utku and Dr. K Chekinski (Dept. of Addictive Behaviour, St Georges, University of London) for their help and supervision in completing this project.