Cinemeducation in psychiatry: a seminar in undergraduate medical education combining a movie, lecture, and patient interview.

OBJECTIVE

Psychiatric educators are often faced with students' negative attitudes toward psychiatry. A new type of seminar has been established in order to enable students to gain a deeper understanding of psychiatric illness.

METHOD

A "cinemeducation seminar," combining a movie, a lecture, and a patient interview, has been established as part of the undergraduate curriculum at Hamburg Medical School, where 1,032 students attended 39 cinemeducation seminars between 2005 and 2008. A student evaluation covering different aspects of education took place after each seminar.

RESULTS

The students valued the combination of a movie and a seminar and found the movie and the additional patient interview useful for accessing the subject of Psychiatry and understanding the underlying psychiatric illnesses shown in the movies.

CONCLUSION

From the students' perspective, this type of seminar seems to be helpful for providing an impression of psychiatric illnesses and enabling students to put themselves in the position of a person suffering from these illnesses. Therefore, we judged the cinemeducation seminar to be an appropriate teaching format in undergraduate medical education.