Tokyo Women's Medical University

School of Medicine

Psychiatry

Overview

Psychiatric care has changed dramatically over the years. The length of hospitalization has been shortened and the relative weight of outpatient care has increased. Although the number of beds in our department, which once had 117, has been reduced to 46, more than 200 patients are seen daily in the outpatient clinic. Our Department has historically worked to expand the scope of psychiatric care. In addition to mental illness, and we also provide a wide range of support for the problems of people with physical illnesses and for the mental health issues faced by women. To achieve this, it is necessary to examine and incorporate the significance of scientific research results while developing medical care with a sound sense of balance. We place particular emphasis on education, and we encourage our medical staff to acquire a therapeutics that takes into consideration QOL (quality of life). In addition, we emphasize team medicine and expect all professions to participate in medical care as equals in the true sense of the word. Specifically, we put this into practice through the Women's Medical College version of psycho-education and psychiatric liaison teams in which all professions work together.

Education Details

Our Department of Psychiatry has a large number of beds, and a wealth of clinical practice and repeated feedback through a wide variety of cases, students acquire skills as clinicians, and at the same time, they conduct clinical research and basic research to ensure a solid foundation as psychiatrists.
In the first year of the second term, the students will train in the wards, and in the second year, they will mainly train in hospital collaboration situations such as liaison and consultation from other departments, aiming to improve their skills. In the third and later years, they are transferred to related medical facilities such as general hospitals, single-department psychiatric hospitals, and specialized clinics, where they make it more realistic to obtain a mental health specialist, psychiatric specialist, or subspecialty specialist certification.

Research Details

Our department is active in multidisciplinary team medicine, and research supporting team medicine is also active.
We have conducted clinical research on the practice of psycho-education by multidisciplinary teams and its outcomes, including the publication of "Psychoeducation of Schizophrenia by Resilience Model".
The multidisciplinary liaison team, backed by an abundance of cases, conducted joint research with various medical departments and was involved, for example, in the development of "Guidelines for the Confirmation of Intent of Living Organ Transplant Donors.
Research on pharmacotherapy is also active, with clinical, genetic, and basic research being conducted in parallel. Our department is one of the first institutions in Japan to have introduced clozapine, a drug for treatment of treatment-resistant schizophrenia, and we are reporting our experience in its use and conducting genetic and basic research on clozapine.

Faculty

Katsuji Nishimura, MD, PhD, Professor and Chairman
Rie Akaho, MD, PhD, Associate Professor
Hidehiro Oshibuchi, MD, PhD, Associate Professor
Hitoshi Takahashi, MD, PhD, Associate Professor

Related links

Research Achievements Database

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