REPRODUCTIVE PSYCHIATRY FELLOWSHIP

Description of Setting: The Motherhood Center is a unique combination of an OMH licensed Partial Hospital Program and an outpatient practice, co-located in a warm, modern setting in mid-town Manhattan. The Motherhood Center serves women with a wide range of psychiatric disorders who come from different age groups, socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. The Motherhood Center is pleased to extend its commitment to excellence in academic training to fellowship applicants interested in learning how to treat perinatal women in both an acute, partial hospital setting as well as in brief and long-term outpatient psychotherapy.

Description of Agency Mission: The Motherhood Center provides supportive mental health services for new and expecting moms, including a range of treatment options for women suffering from perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs). Staffed by experienced professionals, we take an interdisciplinary approach to evaluating and treating women before, during and after pregnancy.

Description of Standard Fellowship Experience: The Motherhood Center Women’s Mental Health Psychiatry Fellowship is a unique training experience that bridges women’s mental health in the perinatal period with an emphasis on attachment and dyadic work with the infant.

• Conduct psychiatric intakes with diagnosis, treatment planning and coordination of care.

• Provide individual medication management.

• Assess early childhood development and the quality of the mother-infant dyadic attachment in our on-site nursery.

• Conduct and hone skills in individual psychotherapy for partial hospitalization programming in a number of modalities, with specific focus on optimizing treatment for perinatal patients. Individual psychotherapy may be psychodynamic, behavioral and/or dyadic in orientation.

• Develop group psychotherapy skills in IPT, DBT and/or Dyadic in orientation. Five groups run daily for partial hospitalization program patients. Fellows will have the opportunity to either co-lead and/or independently run group therapy sessions each week.

• Learn family and couples therapy. Intensive supervision, with an expert in the field, focusing on various techniques addressing the management of current stressors, communication patterns, adjustment to new roles, and addressing adaptive and maladaptive intergenerational patterns in the family.

• Receive supervision: Supervision will be provided for medication management, psychotherapy, group therapy, and psychiatric intakes. Weekly group medication management supervision with Dr. Catherine Birndorf.

• Attend and participate in daily rounds with an interdisciplinary team of psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and medical practitioners.

• Collaborate with all members of The Motherhood Center staff and interact with patients in both partial hospitalization day program and outpatient program.

Outpatient Experience: The fellow will treat pregnant and postpartum women who require treatment due to perinatal mood and anxiety symptoms, attachment/bonding issues, traumatic birth experiences or acute psychiatric crises. Fellows will carry a full caseload of about 5-10 individual medication management +/-psychotherapy cases, conduct weekly psychiatric intakes, co-lead one group therapy session per week, and participate in dyadic and family/couples’ treatment in both the partial hospitalization program and the outpatient program.

Seminars & Conferences: The fellowship position will include access to ongoing didactics and case conferences to help deepen the clinician’s knowledge in the following topics: perinatal psychiatry, short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy, dyadic therapy, dialectical-behavior therapy, trauma, personality disorders, psychopharmacology, couples/family therapy, systems of care, case formulation and professional development.

Scholarly Project: Over the course of the one-year fellowship, the fellow will be mentored in development of a scholarly project of their choice, related to PMAD’s. This can include an independent research project, review article, case study, or book chapter. It may also include presentation at a professional conference.

Supervision Arrangements/Ratio: The fellow will be provided with at least 2 hours of the following weekly supervision: Medication management, case formulation, individual psychotherapy, and group psychotherapy with Drs. Catherine Birndorf, Elizabeth Albertini and Nicole Van Nortwick.