Mental health internship for medical students: Which is the best training setting?

Abstract

The 2014 Curricular Guidelines of the medical undergraduate courses include Mental Health (MH) as one of the required areas of internship. The objective of this paper is to present the integrated internship for MH and Family and Community Medicine (FCM) of UFRJ, as well as the rationale for choosing Primary Health Care (PHC) as the setting for the internship training. It presents a report of the experience of the integrated internship for MH and FCM of UFRJ and the discussion of its theoretical frameworks. The high prevalence of psychological distress and mental disorders in PHC, the fact that PHC is the gateway to the unified national health system (SUS) and the fact that the medical school must train general practitioners, make PHC a privileged locus for the training of medical interns in mental health.