Getting our own house in order: improving psychiatry education to medical students as a prelude to medical school education reform.

OBJECTIVE: The authors summarize efforts to revitalize psychiatry teaching to medical students at Harvard Medical School (HMS) in advance of a major overhaul of the medical school curriculum. METHODS: This preliminary report chronicles key challenges and the organization of the reform effort within the departments of psychiatry affiliated with the medical school. RESULTS: Based upon a comprehensive internal review of psychiatric education at the medical school, the HMS Psychiatry Executive Committee and psychiatry faculty concluded that psychiatry teaching was underresourced and lacked cohesion and consistent standards and expectations across clinical sites involved in psychiatry teaching. Through a willingness to identify and vigorously address deficiencies in medical student education within a large decentralized program, psychiatry has earned a reputation as an effective reform agent at the medical school. CONCLUSIONS: Psychiatry education improvements have strengthened our partnership with the medical school as it is undertaking major educational reform of its entire curriculum.

From Alice Cooper to Marilyn Manson: the significance of adolescent antiheroes.

Every generation has icons attractive to adolescents and equally repugnant to adults. This article examines antihero characteristics, their appeal to adolescents, and how adults can respond to adolescents enamored of antiheroes. The stage personas of antiheroes champion rejection of the mainstream, assail adult constraints and expectations, explore frightening topics, and ultimately fulfill the adolescent fantasy of surviving alienation and emerging victorious over parents and peers. But antihero idolization also tests the adult's defenses. Adults, fearing loss of control and rejection by the adolescent, sometimes resort to primitive defenses mismatched to the developmental needs of the adolescent. Adults, as much as the adolescents, benefit from examining their individual reactions to the antihero and how their current relationship can accommodate this intrusion. The antihero phenomenon presents adults with an opportunity to model ways to think through that which is uncomfortable and to navigate together the adolescent's developmentally normative separation efforts.