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The Adequacy Of Pa Didactic Psychiatric Education, Dean Berzins

Theses and Graduate Projects

With a shortage of mental health specialists, primary care providers, which increasingly include physician assistants (PAs), must be able to adequately recognize, diagnose, and treat common mental health disorders. Unfortunately, providers are not currently able to meet this challenge and frequently underdiagnose and undertreat psychiatric conditions. This paper examined the amount of didactic education in psychodiagnostics PA students receive compared to the amount of didactic psychodiagnostics training psychotherapists students receive in graduate school. Results indicated that while psychotherapists have, on average, more classroom time, the difference in seat time between PAs and psychotherapists is less than double, but the assigned …