The medication seminar and primary care education.

This paper defines the need to provide postgraduate psychiatric education to primary care physicians, as well as the need to provide psychiatrists with teaching experiences in the primary care setting. Two psychiatrists in rural New England developed and administered, over an eight-month period, a Balint-type seminar on psychotropic medications, designed to emphasize experiential and two-way learning. The process of the seminar reflected the special problems encountered in post-graduate education of physicians in a rural area. The impact on the instructors and participants had implications for the design and development of future educational programs in both psychiatry and primary care.