The events below are resident-led with faculty support and typically occur at lunch time or in the early evenings. They are opportunities to gather, share expertise, build community, and learn collaboratively together with our faculty and leaders in our community. These events can use your ideas and energy--please contact us if you are interested in helping to plan an event!
Our events seek to foster critical knowledge, skills, and attitudes to be successful clinicians and leaders in global mental health and public psychiatry careers.
Site visits occur within our core curriculum (please see Curriculum page) for all residents, as well as extracurricularly. Site visits are designed to increase our contextual understanding of our patients and places with high relevance to public psychiatry and global mental health--e.g., school-based mental health, Skid Row, homeless services, Twin Towers Correctional Facility. Our hope is that these site visits will increase our empathy and connection with highly vulnerable patients; will foster lasting connections with community organizations and service providers; and will help us envision future careers in public service.
The Policy and Change event series is an opportunity for faculty and residents to join with community leaders to discuss pressing current health-related events and opportunities for direct policy advocacy involving mental health providers. These events pair a journal club--to generate a foundational understanding of a particular issue from multiple perspectives and to illustrate the usefulness of health services/policy research in advocacy spaces--with panel discussions with local policy leaders, culminating in immediate (in the room), short-term, and long-term advocacy action in partnership with community organizations.
These events aim to foster structural competency and action and encourage us to view advocacy as intrinsic to our roles as physicians. The goal of our advocacy is not focused on political party but is to improve the health and lives of our patients, particularly under-resourced and other vulnerable populations. While Policy and Change events are, by necessity, directional with respect to a particular issue, CGP welcomes and is inclusive of all views, encourages attendees to express their views freely, and supports trainees and others with alternative perspectives and expertise.
Past events include: "Family Separations at the Border," "Gun Violence as a Public Health Issue," "The Dangers for People with Mental Illness and Other Disabilities at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center," and "Ending Jail Expansion in Los Angeles County." We have partnered with local and state organizations for these events, including Dignity and Power Now, Justice-LA, Project 180, Refugee Health Alliance, and Disability Rights California.
These lunchtime events are opportunities for community building and for sharing common challenges and solutions that we all face within public psychiatry clinical settings. These informal group supervision meetings give residents opportunities to learn from expert public psychiatry faculty members outside of residents' current clinical settings--to see how they may tackle similar issues from different perspectives and draw upon different community resources.
These monthly lunches feature public psychiatrists, mental health services and policy researchers, and other leaders and clinicians from LA County Department of Mental Health and other community organizations. Speakers talk about their career paths, current work, and opportunities for residents to work in public service.
A quarterly event, this series approaches the traditional clinical case conference through the lens of social and structural determinants of health and illness. A single clinical case is explored by residents and multi-disciplinary faculty, focusing on social contexts, institutional policies, local resources, legislation, and social forces, emphasizing the importance of these in all patient encounters and opportunities to understand and act structurally.
These events are led by CGP partners at the Hammer Museum at UCLA. From the Hammer Museum's description of these events: "At the Hammer Museum at UCLA, museum educators are more explicit and intentional about raising awareness about inequities through discussions about art. The Hammer Museum’s mission is: 'We believe in the promise of art and ideas to illuminate our lives and build a more just world.' Stemming from its mission, the museum exhibits works that address pressing social, cultural, and political issues... Whether examining an Old Master painting or a work by a contemporary Los Angeles artist, museum educators at the Hammer find ways to further our mission by bringing awareness to inequities—whether they are explicitly addressed in an artwork, revealed through context, or made apparent through thematic connections to present-day concerns. "
Highly interactive sessions in which our faculty medical anthropologists lead discussion of residents' and faculty members' field notes from their everyday clinical experiences. Contacts: Philippe and Ippolytos