Mental Illness and its Pharmacologic Management (MBS-0229)

Spring 2024 · MBS 0229 · Tufts University · 1.5 credits · Undergraduate

Emotional disorders and mental illness are commonly encountered in medical practice by primary care physicians, internists, and most of the medical subspecialties. These disorders can present as the principal reason for seeking health care, or as components or consequences of other underlying medical disorders. The majority of such individuals are not referred for specialty treatment by psychiatrists, but rather are managed by their primary physicians. The principal objective of this course is to introduce MBS candidates -- the majority of whom will go on to become physicians involved in primary health care delivery -- to the fundamental features of emotional disorders and mental illnesses encountered in clinical medicine, and pharmacologic approaches to management of these disorders. The instructional strategy will involve integrated teaching by Tufts-affiliated physicians having extensive experience in clinical psychopharmacology, together with basic/clinical pharmacology instruction by the course director and other faculty with a focus on mechanisms of psychotropic drug action, principles of appropriate clinical use, and recognition of hazards and adverse reactions. The course will meet once each week for 12 weeks in the Spring semester for 90 minutes per session, for a total of 20 contact hours. The core topics will be: - The epidemiology of mental illness, and the relation to primary care medicine. - Anxiety and panic disorders - Anxiolytic and anti-panic drugs - Sleep disorders - Sedative-hypnotic medications - The clinical spectrum of depression and mood disorders - Antidepressant agents - Bipolar disorder and its treatment - Schizophrenia and other thought disorders - Medications used to treat schizophrenia - Substance abuse and its pharmacologic treatment - Complementary and alternative medicines - Genetics of mental illness and its pharmacologic treatment - Drug interactions in psychopharmacology - Topical review

Course codes: MBS-0229, MBS 0229, MBS0229, MBS-229, MBS 229, MBS229

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