The Division of Medical Psychiatry provides consultation-liaison services for inpatients suffering from both psychiatric and medical disorders. Our psychiatrists specialize in the treatment of illness at the interface of medicine and psychiatry, including delirium, catatonia, neurocognitive disorders, and complications of psychiatric illness or interventions. As such, we focus on the evaluation and treatment of patients with neuropsychiatric symptoms that may result from medical, surgical, gynecologic and oncologic illness, as well as patients with primary psychiatric illness complicated by medical disease. Additionally, we treat patients struggling to cope with medical illness as well as end-of-life issues. We provide comprehensive psychiatric assessments of medical and surgical inpatients in the general hospital setting and in the Emergency Department at Brigham and Women's and Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospitals along with treatment recommendations including psychopharmacologic and psychological therapies.
The Division provides subspecialty psychiatric expertise in numerous areas of medicine and surgery such as epilepsy, critical care, cardiac transplantation, lung transplantation, face/limb transplantation, burn/trauma, oncologic illness, palliative care/end-of life issues, and women's health including infertility and pregnancy related disorders. We offer forensic expertise to assist teams with legal and ethical challenges that accompany the care of their patients. We also provide consultation services regarding alcohol and substance-related disorders including the management of acute substance intoxication and withdrawal as well as referral services for outpatient substance use treatment. At Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital, a new Addiction Recovery Consultation Service, a collaboration between the Department of Psychiatry and the Department of Medicine, is now available and provides consultations to medical, surgical and emergency department patients.
The service team includes twenty-two attending psychiatrists across the two hospitals, sixteen of which are subspecialty trained in the field of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry. The division is the home of the Brigham and Women's/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Consultation Liaison Psychiatry Fellowship which trains six PGY-5 Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry fellows per year. In addition, the service is a core training site for PGY-1, PGY-2 and PGY-3 residents from the Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School Psychiatry Residency Training Program as well as students from Harvard Medical School. Fellows training in Addiction Psychiatry, Addiction Medicine and Women's Mental Health also rotate on the service. Finally, our clinical team works closely with social workers in the Department of Care Continuum Management to provide a multidisciplinary and comprehensive approach to patient care.
The Brigham and Women's Hospital Medical Psychiatry Complex Diagnostic Evaluation Service performs comprehensive evaluations for patients with challenging diagnostic and therapeutic problems, potentially involving the intersection of psychiatric, medical and neurologic illness. Patients come from around the region, nation and world for this unique expert service. The director of the service, Dr. Michael Mufson, collaborates with an extensive group of clinicians in all fields of psychiatry and medicine for the evaluation of these complex cases.
