Student’s dilemma in Choosing UG Psychiatry Book for CBME Curriculum

Volume 12 Issues 6 June, 2022

For many students, choosing the right textbook for a subject can be a rather tedious process. Most of us depend on advice from professors of various departments and senior colleagues. It is essential that we choose the right book while getting introduced to the subject itself. Psychiatry is one subject which explores both data and descriptive content and hence the need for a textbook which represents data in a simple manner and the latter with the help of as many learning tools (Infographics, mind-maps etc.) as possible. Another requirement is for the current range of Indian authored textbooks to be updated according to the requirements prescribed by CBME. There were a few options that I had narrowed down to, namely: A Short Textbook of Psychiatry by Neeraj Ahuja, Glimpses of Psychiatry for Doctors and Medical Students by MINDS, Mastering Psychiatry: A Core Textbook for Undergraduates and finally, notes provided by coaching institutes. Let me explain some of the challenges I faced while picking one textbook out of the above four options.

      A Short Textbook of Psychiatry by Neeraj Ahuja while being a great book that is apt for Indian medical education has not been updated according to the CBME guidelines as of yet. The reason this poses a challenge is that as a third-year MBBS student, who already has Psychiatry classes conducted during the course, I don’t have an updated textbook to refer to before or after the classes. Additionally, the CBME curriculum has categorized the competencies into core and non-core competencies which also allows us to priorities the stages of our self-learning process. Glimpses of Psychiatry for Doctors and Medical Students by MINDS and Mastering Psychiatry: A Core Textbook for Undergraduates were great books to explore because the formatting of content was crisp and interesting. However, the challenge for an Indian medical student is that the information has been presented in a very unconventional and new way which requires us to adapt and explore the learning curve. Finally, the notes provided by coaching institutes are very crisp and well color coded and adequately spaced. While the format of these notes is welcome, the content solely focuses on post-graduate medical entrance examinations. Hopefully, we will be able to bridge the gap between what students require and what authors can offer, over the coming years.

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