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Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine

What will psychiatry look like in the years ahead?  The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine at Carilion Clinic and Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine is helping to build a future vision of psychiatry.  Our clinical and research faculty and learners are building a measurement-based approach to care delivery. Utilizing a comprehensive electronic health record, the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine is creating a learning system. 

Through our Divisions of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Adult, and Geriatric Psychiatry, we target each developmental stage of life, from infancy through advanced maturity.

Our faculty, trainees, and staff provide care in schools and universities, community clinics, and in public-sector settings.

We work to integrate our services into specialty clinics, primary care, and with community-based agencies.

We are growing specialty clinics within psychiatry that focus on developmental stages and on severe major syndromes encompassing mental illness and substance use disorders.

We reach out to our communities through our tele-psychiatry program via emergency psychiatry, inpatient psychiatry, ambulatory care, consultation, and tele-therapy.

We work in an interdisciplinary nature — while learning, providing care, and in the conduct of cutting-edge research. Our culture is one that values collaboration, creativity, and hard work, but also values a work/life balance.  Our clinicians, educators, researchers, and learners are each valued members of a department working to create the future of psychiatry.  

Faculty

Value Domains

The Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine department supports the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine value domains in the following ways:

Basic Science

Our faculty are integrated into the neuroscience curriculum, and work through the problem based approach to help students make the connections between brain, genetics, behavior, cognition, and emotion.

Clinical Science

In clinical skills development, LACE, clerkships, and selectives, our faculty strive to provide the environment and experiences to optimize understanding of mental illness and substance use disorders in a range of settings, as well as the critical role behavioral medicine plays in primary care settings. 

Research

Our faculty are pursuing some of the most sophisticated neuroscience research in the nation, and actively engage students in their efforts. We work with the entire life spectrum, from the very young to the very old.

The techniques and approaches are comprehensive and include laboratory work with animal models, computational psychiatry, functional neuroimaging, deep brain stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and clinical trials.

The areas of focus include neurodegeneration, cognition, emotional dysregulation, addictions, autism, mood disorders, and more. 

Health Systems Science and Interprofessional Practice

Health care is a team sport. This is most clearly the case in Psychiatry, where we work together as teams of disciplines, each bringing key expertise to patient care; physicians, nurses, psychologists, pharmacists, social workers, and other professionals (both learners and faculty) reflect the interprofessional ethos critical to optimal care delivery. In addition, through patient encounters, students are exposed to health systems topics such as population health, quality and safety, equity value-based care, health disparities, and clinical informatics, including telehealth.

Student Research

Not all student research projects are represented here, only those that have been published.