A Collaboration Between a Historically Black University and an Ivy League Psychiatric Research Center: A Psychiatrist’s Reflections of the Impact on Residency Training

Abstract

As detailed in the preceding paper, a central aim of the collaboration between our two institutions is building research capacity in minority—particularly, AfricanAmerican—mental health. Building capacity is at the heart of my role in the collaboration, specifically, and at my university more broadly. As the training director of the psychiatry residency program, I am responsible for coordinating training for a small but very vibrant group of residents. Most of our residents are minority or international medical graduates; therefore, cultural competency has assumed an ever increasing role in our curriculum. In accordance with the our university’s mission, we take care to select residents who are sympathetic and possibly committed to the cause of reducing racial disparities in mental health. Our university, being the largest historically Black university in the country, has played a unique role in efforts to reduce disparities by training and promoting minority health care researchers. Our university hospital was built on the foundations of Freedmen’s Hospital and Asylum that cared for freed, disabled, and aged blacks. In 1868, after the Civil War, Freedmen’s Hospital became the teaching hospital of our university medical school. In 1909, a new 278-bed Freedmen’s Hospital was erected. Finally in 1975, the current and modern University Hospital was opened. Since that time the university had a small but thriving psychiatry department and is one of the main sites for African-American and other minority candidates to get residency training in psychiatry. The Psychiatry Residency Program was established in 1955 by a visionary Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist E.Y. Williams and is one of the oldest psychiatry training programs in the DC area. The current chair is a well-known researcher in the area of health disparities. There is debate whether ‘‘race-based institutions of higher learning’’ like ours should exist in this day and age. Some consider them completely unnecessary and