Teaching of psychiatry: customising the curriculum of medical students for ASEAN

The need for effective education in psychiatry for all doctors is as great in developing countries as in developed ones, especially in ASEAN, where many psychiatric cases are managed by non psychiatric doctors. The curriculum must be designed to ensure that physicians have the ability to diagnose and treat the most common psychiatric disorders but it may be customised to the data or needs of each specific country in ASEAN. Three topics that have been proposed for inclusion in the curriculum are disaster psychiatry/mental health, ethnopsycho-pharmacology, and critical appraisal of publications. Integrating psychiatry within other disciplines and using problem based learning (PBL) in undergraduate students may be an alternative approach in the teaching of psychiatry.