Aims

Our philosophy (beliefs and values)

The psychiatric department of USWR emphasizes the following:

1.         Mental health is more than a lack of mental disorder it includes the inner sense of well-being, self-confidence, independence, and a sense of belonging to the God Almighty.

2.         All people should have access to psychiatric counseling, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation services.

3.         All psychiatric patients should be treated humanely; stigmatization of psychiatric patients must be avoided.

4.         Non-professional interventions by non-physician persons in psychiatric patients should be prohibited according to law.       

Our Vision

In the coming 5 years, our psychiatric residency program aims to be among the top 3 in the region concerning education, treatment, research, and rehabilitation standards.

Our Mission

Our primary mission is to educate psychiatrists who are aware of our rich and fruitful Irani-Islamic scientific, spiritual, and cultural heritage and yet at the same time fully skilled with modern-day knowledge of neuroscience, and who are fully appreciative of the Iranian people who have provided them with the opportunities to learn and become a psychiatrist.

As a department in the University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Science, we highly emphasize the importance of psychiatric rehabilitation, especially with nearly 850 in-patients who suffer continually from severe mental disorders in Razi Center.

Our Expected Outcome

We in the psychiatric department of USWR have the following objectives as our expected outcome:

1.         Educating and training our postgraduate trainees as psychiatrists who are able to act as:

a)         An effective member of a medical team for diagnosis, treatment, prevention, and rehabilitation of mental disorders.

b)         A skilled manager of other members of the mental health profession.

c)         A skilled planner for mental health plans in the community.

d)         An able researcher in applied research in psychiatry.

e)         A knowledgeable person about the culture, traditions, and literature of Iran.

f)         A conscientious person to ethical and professional rules of medicine.

2.         Planning and performing necessary epidemiological research at the national level about mental health issues.

3.         Advocacy of the rights of people with mental health issues.

4.         Participation in collaborative attempts to decrease social pathologies such as crimes, suicide, addiction, aggression in the community, child abuse, and elderly abuse.

Teaching

A psychiatrist is a physician who has demonstrated much brilliance, diligence, and commitment to high standards of morality and ethics by completing an arduous 7-8 year medical course, and after which, excelled in a very difficult entry exam to go on to complete yet another 4-year Psychiatry residency program. This 4 years course requires that the physician in training reads more than 10,000 pages of reference books and more than 20,000 pages of medical Journals, and visits and treats nearly 10,000 patients under the supervision of her [or his] tutors. Each year he or she has to pass at least 4 formal theoretical and clinical exams. After four years, he or she has to pass another 2 more final exams (pre-board and board exams).

It should be mentioned that diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders is a special domain of psychiatrists. Psychiatrists are capable of performing all modalities of treatment, including psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy, ECT, and so on. A psychiatrist heads the psychiatric treatment team which includes a psychiatric nurse, psychiatric social worker, Occupational therapist, and clinical psychologist. Each of these members is supervised by a psychiatrist.

Achievements

Although the Department of Psychiatry of USWR is one of the youngest, it had many notable achievements in recent years. Among them:

1.         Training 80 eminent psychiatrists with some of them now in the educational, managerial, and research positions in Iran.

2.         Two postgraduate trainees of our department had achieved second place in board examinations and 3 of them achieved third place in the board examinations.

3.         Our department is among the few departments of psychiatry that delivers all the details of the 4years curriculum of psychiatry residency.

4.         We eagerly look forward to more progress and service to the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Services we offer

The main site of this department is the Razi Psychiatric Educational and Treatment Center in Shahr-e-Ray province, southeast of Tehran. This hospital is the largest psychiatric hospital in the Middle East. At one point, its inpatients numbered nearly 2500 people with severe mental problems; now, however, its inhabitants are 1100 people with 250 of them treated in educational wards under the management of the Department of Psychiatry USWR. Other beds are “co-managed” under the supervision of treatment deputy of the university and hospital’s director.

Contact

psychiatry@uswr.ac.ir