Acad Psychiatry DOI 10.1007/s40596-015-0286-0
COLUMN: EDUCATIONAL CASE REPORT
Reading the Mind: A Social Media-Facilitated Collaboration of US and UK Graduate Psychiatry Trainees Rachnanjali Lal & Matthew E. Peters & Carol Kan & Margaret S. Chisolm
Received: 28 August 2014 / Accepted: 13 January 2015 # Academic Psychiatry 2015
The purpose of this report is to describe a social mediafacilitated book group collaboration between graduate psychiatry trainees at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the USA and the South London and Maudsley National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust in the UK. Having an international venue to share culturally based observations and ideas about psychiatric texts enhances traditional graduate medical education methods and provides a model for life-long learning. Social media tools, which allow for dissemination of information and exchange of ideas among a global network of participants, are ideal for overcoming temporal and geographic barriers to international collaboration [1]. Several studies have shown the benefits of integrating social media into medical education [2]. Incorporating these tools allows medical trainees to engage and contribute to their own learning, which is considered one of the most effective methods of teaching [3]. Group discussions, especially through social media, are underutilized throughout the education system [4]. With this in mind, Johns Hopkins approached the Maudsley training program to create a new social mediafacilitated branch of the Maudsley’s existing Reading the Mind book group. Each branch conducts in-person meetings and the two branches communicate with one another via an interactive Twitter account and blogs. Combining in-person group discussion of seminal psychiatric texts with asynchronous discussion via Twitter and blogs has enabled the Johns Hopkins and Maudsley graduate trainees to create a forum for integrated, transcontinental education. R. Lal : M. E. Peters (*) : M. S. Chisolm Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Kan Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, London, UK
Case Description The South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust is a massive training scheme, consisting of 120 posts in postgraduate years 1–3 (core training stage) and another 100 posts in postgraduate years 4–6 (specialist training stage). Over the past several years, strong curricular emphasis has been placed on developing clinical competencies and meeting the UK’s Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists requirements. Limited resources in the curriculum were dedicated to learning about critical concepts in the development and history of psychiatry. Anecdotal evidence suggested that the Maudsley psychiatric trainees wanted to expand their education in areas of psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and neuroscience, among others. Thus, in March 2011, the Maudsley Reading the Mind book group was born. The facilitators of Reading the Mind consist of self-selected Maudsley psychiatric trainees, from across all training years. A list of titles of possible book group reading selections was compiled from various sources, including the British Journal of Psychiatry [5, 6] and personal recommendations from senior academics/clinicians. The initial title chosen for the group was The Divided Self by RD Laing and, since then, participants have read a range of books on topics such as philosophy (Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennet), the antipsychiatry movement (Doctoring the Mind by Richard Bentall), and psychoanalysis (Studies on Hysteria by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer). Meetings are scheduled bimonthly and titles are chosen for the next meeting from the list by meeting attendees. Meetings are held on training site grounds and, on average, 15 trainees attend each meeting, although attendance has ranged from 7–29 trainees per meeting. Each 60-min meeting of the group begins with initial impressions of the selected text followed by an in-depth
Acad Psychiatry
discussion about its content and relevance to psychiatry. In September 2013, after 84 meetings of Reading the Mind, a focus group of eight Maudsley trainees was interviewed to obtain feedback on the book group. Participants reported that they were not only more likely to read extra-curricular materials, but were even applying concepts explored in the book group to clinical situations. The results of this focus group helped support the leaders’ impressions of its utility in psychiatric training [7]. Maudsley and John Hopkins have a long history of collaboration. Each psychiatry training program offers an exchange of trainees for 6 months of academic research or educational scholarship with the other institution. When Hopkins faculty member and one of this report’s authors (MC) discovered the existence of the Reading the Mind book group via the Maudsley group’s Twitter account @Maudsley_RTM, she contacted the account’s leader and one of this report’s authors (CK) to discuss the possibility of forming a branch of the book group at Hopkins, in an effort to further the link between the two institutions. After e-mail and Skype conversations, a social media-facilitated international collaboration between the two training programs was born and, in July 2013, Johns Hopkins officially announced the formation of the Hopkins branch of Reading the Mind. A core leadership group of Johns Hopkins residents (at least one from each postgraduate year) was formed and agreed that initially, the Hopkins book group members would read the book title chosen by the Maudsley. The Hopkins trainees were invited to contribute titles to the master list from which books are selected. Some of the more recent works discussed by both branches include Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl and Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology by Russell Jacoby. Both branches also have had authors come to discuss their works in person. Because of the collaboration, Hopkins was able to facilitate their faculty member Kay Redfield Jamison’s appearance with her book, An Unquiet Mind, at both the Hopkins and Maudsley branch meetings of the book group. In addition, one of the Maudsley Reading the Mind co-founders, Lisa Conlan, attended a Hopkins branch meeting in the USA; and a Hopkins faculty member and one of the authors of this report (MC) attended a Maudsley branch meeting in the UK. The Johns Hopkins branch meetings are held in the evening at the faculty advisor’s home. Each meeting lasts 90 min, with the first 30 min devoted to dinner and socialization and the remaining 60 min to discussion of the text. On average, 10 trainees attend each meeting, although attendance has ranged from 6–19 trainees per meeting. The faculty advisor livetweets highlights of the discussion using the Twitter hashtag #rtmind, which was developed specifically for Reading the Mind so that interested trainees from the Maudsley branch (whose meeting discussing the same book occurs about 5 days following the Hopkins meeting) and the public can follow and
join in the discussion, if desired. Use of the Twitter hashtag has enabled discussion and learning points to occur asynchronously and irrespective of physical distance between the two group’s meetings. Twitter has also been used to facilitate discussion about book with relevant authors and to refine the booklist. Altogether, Twitter has facilitated a vibrant continuous and international conversation about books relevant to psychiatry, has informed understanding of differing cultural viewpoints, and has encouraged intellectual debate among a diverse group of learners. The sharing of ideas has fostered a new form of active learning literally accessible from the palms of the participants’ hands. In addition to Twitter, the book group has used other social media tools to enhance reflection and collaboration between the US and UK trainees. Maudsley trainees who formed the Reading the Mind book group also created a blog The Art of Psychiatry Society and the Reading The Mind Book Group (www.artofpsychiatry.co.uk) to explore the shared elements between the arts and psychiatry. In addition to reporting on other broader activities of the Society, the blog announces the book group’s upcoming titles and summarizes the group’s discussions after each meeting. In July 2013, a blog specific to the Maudsley Reading the Mind book group was launched (http://maudsleyreadingthemind.wordpress.com) and includes a page devoted to the Hopkins branch, as well as the newly minted Verona branch, of the group. In addition to Twitter and blogs, the Hopkins branch has used the social media platform Storify, which enables a narrative to be built around selected tweets using a specific hashtag, to capture their discussion and to create a summary of the meeting to post to the Maudsley blogs.
Discussion In the last 10 years, Facebook traffic has exploded with 1.28 billion current monthly active users and social media has steadily become more popular [8]. Social media tools are already widely used by medical trainees [9], as they enable easy sharing of opinions, ideas, multimedia resources, and references on an international level. Several studies have shown the benefits of integrating social media into medical education [3, 10, 11]. Social media allows medical trainees to engage and contribute to their own learning, which is considered one of the most effective methods of teaching [3]. This potential has stimulated medical professionals to experiment with social media, using Twitter journal clubs, live-tweeting from and blogging about scientific meetings, and Google Hangout panel discussions, to enhance undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education. Entire online communities of medical learners have been created using social media-facilitated communication, including such exemplars as Academic Life in Emergency Medicine (ALiEM) (www.aliem.com) and the
Acad Psychiatry
General Internal Medicine Connect for the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) (www.aliem.com). ALiEM has hosted the Global Emergency Medicine Journal Club since 2013 [12, 13] and SGIM’s journal club debuted in 2014 [4], both of which are perceived as highly successful forums for furthering medical education. In addition to physicians, other health care professionals are using social media to enhance education and discovery [14, 15]. One notable example especially relevant to this report is the Social Work Book Group, which was founded in 2012 at the University of Central Lancashire’s undergraduate social work program [16]. This meeting of 40 participants is live-streamed three times a year to six other universities across the UK. In addition, the group has established a Twitter account @SWBookGroup, which serves to engage the wider social work community and further expand discussion. As health care professionals and trainees begin to venture into the world of social media, they must be aware of the public, permanent, and amplified nature of such communication and the challenges these tools pose to professionalism, including the potential risks to patient privacy and the blurring of professional and personal boundaries [17, 18]. In response to these concerns, societies of physicians around the world, including the USA and UK, have developed guidelines regarding the professional use of social media [19, 20]. Integrating medicine’s core cultural values of confidentiality, privacy, and one-to-one interactions with social media’s cultural values of connection, sharing, transparency, openness, and informality does present potential challenges [21]. However, when medical education curricula using social media have been implemented and evaluated, the pre-implementation concerns regarding medical professionalism have waned in comparison to those regarding technical problems of the actual implementation [22]. Balancing the values of medicine and the potential of social media is an evolving process that will continue to be refined. Specific training regarding social media professionalism and consistent long-term studies of the risks and benefits of these tools will be essential to inform the use of social media in medical education [4, 23]. In this social media-facilitated US and UK book group collaboration, trainees from both countries have noted challenges to collaboration arising from their location in different time zones. In addition, although both branches have expressed a desire for their respective groups to meet more frequently, this has been challenging due to the intense clinical time demands on both the US and UK trainees. Taking all this into account, Reading the Mind continues to evolve and make improvements each year. Future directions include the decision by the Johns Hopkins branch to choose some titles independently from the Maudsley branch. This decision arose at first by necessity, when the two branches needed to read An Unquiet Mind 1 month apart to accommodate Dr. Jamison’s travel schedule. The first independently selected title by the
Hopkins branch was Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home, which represented a radically different genre for the book group. Since then, the Hopkins branch has begun curating a new list of books, using the Maudsley branch’s list as its base and has been considering including works of fiction such as Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Given the trainees’ desire to meet more frequently, the Hopkins residents have also decided to meet more frequently and so, in the 2014–2015 academic year, the Hopkins branch of Reading the Mind will convene monthly. The Hopkins branch has also developed its own blog (www.hopkinsreadingthemind.com), whose reflective essays on the meetings will be cross-posted to the Maudsley blog. Finally, the Hopkins branch hopes to explore ways of linking to a print journal to publish brief book reviews and discussion points, which could link to social media-based discussions. More than a passing fad, social media tools are allowing healthcare professionals and trainees to communicate and learn from one other, despite constraints such as distance and time. The Maudsley–Johns Hopkins Reading the Mind book group collaboration is an innovative example of how ideas and values can be shared and built upon through social media. The reflections coming from these discussions, both in person and online, cultivate the core knowledge, values, and skills essential to professional development and foster the shared desire of all trainees to become clinically excellent psychiatrists. Implications for Educators • Medical educators need more innovative teaching tools to facilitate deeper learning outside of clinical and traditional didactic settings. • The book group format demonstrates the values of collaborative peerto-peer learning in developing critical thinking. • Twitter feeds and blogs are an effective method of having these discussions continue outside the live group setting and encourage international collaborations.
Funding No funding or other support was received for this project. The UK branch of the book club receives funding from the Maudsley Charity. Disclosures Dr. Kan receives salary support from Novo Nordisk UK Research Foundation.
References 1. Frankish K, Ryan C, Harris A. Psychiatry and online social media: potential, pitfalls and ethical guidelines for psychiatrists and trainees. Australas Psychiatry. 2012;20(3):181–7. 2. Cheston CC, Flickinger TE, Chisolm MS. Social media use in medical education: a systematic review. Academic Medicine. 2013;88: 893.
Acad Psychiatry 3. Potts HW. Student experiences of creating and sharing material in online learning. Med Teach. 2011;33(11):e607–14. 4. Chretien KC, Kind T. Social media and clinical care: ethical, professional, and social implications. Circulation. 2013;127(13):1413–21. 5. Gelder M. Ten books. British Journal of Psychiatry. 2003;183:269. 6. Wessely S. Ten books. The British Journal of Psychiatry. 2002;181: 81. 7. Kan C, Harrison S, Robinson B, Barnes A, Chisolm M, Conlan L. The use of a trainee-led book group as a supplementary education tool for psychiatric training in the 21st century. Medical Teacher 2014. 8. Facebook Newsroom. Facebook newsroom. . Retrieved April 30th 2014. 9. MacDonald J, Sohn S, Ellis P. Privacy, professionalism and Facebook: a dilemma for young doctors. Med Educ. 2010;8(44):805. 10. McGee JB, Begg M. What medical educators need to know about "Web 2.0". Med Teach. 2008;30(2):164–9. 11. Varga-Atkins T, Dangerfield P, Brigden D. Developing professionalism through the use of wikis: a study with first-year undergraduate medical students. Med Teach. 2010;32(10):824–9. 12. Mehta N, Flickinger T. The times they are a-changin': academia, social media and the JGIM Twitter Journal Club. J Gen Intern Med. 2014;5. 13. Radecki RP, Rezaie SR, Lin M. Annals of Emergency Medicine Journal Club. Global Emergency Medicine Journal Club: Social media responses to the November 2013 Annals of Emergency Medicine Journal Club. Ann Emerg Med. 2014;63(4):490–4. 14. Ferguson C, Inglis SC, Newton PJ, Cripps PJ, MacDonald PS, Davidson PM. Social media: a tool to spread information: a case
15.
16.
17. 18. 19.
20.
21. 22.
23.
study analysis of Twitter conversation at the Cardiac Society of Australia & New Zealand 61st annual scientific meeting 2013. Collegian. 2014;21(2):89–93. Casella E, Mills J, Usher K. Social media and nursing practice: changing the balance between the social and technical aspects of work. Collegian. 2014;21(2):121–6. Taylor A. The social work book group: using fiction to support learning. 2014; Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/social-carenetwork/social-life-blog/2014/jun/06/social-work-book-group Crotty BH, Mostaghimi A, Arora VM. Online identities of physicians. JAMA. 2013;310(23):2566–7. DeCamp M, Koenig TW, Chisolm MS. Social media and physicians’ online identity crisis. JAMA. 2013;310(6):581–2. Cunningham AM. General medical council: doctors use of social media. 2014; Available at: http://www.gmc-uk.org/guidance/10900. asp Hatwell K. American Medical Association: New AMA policy helps guide physicians’ use of social media. 2010; Available at: http:// www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/news/news/social-media-policy.page. Accessed 11/02. Hughes B, Joshi I, Wareham J. Health 2.0 and Medicine 2.0: tensions and controversies in the field. J Med Internet Res. 2008;10(3):e23. Roy D, Taylor J, Cheston C, Flinkinger T, Chisolm M. Social media: portrait of an emerging tool in medical education. Acad Psychiatr 2014. In press. Kind T. Social media milestones: entrusting trainees to conduct themselves responsibly and professionally. J Grad Med Educ. 2014;6(1): 170–1.
COLUMN: EDUCATIONAL CASE REPORT
Reading the Mind: A Social Media-Facilitated Collaboration of US and UK Graduate Psychiatry Trainees Rachnanjali Lal & Matthew E. Peters & Carol Kan & Margaret S. Chisolm
Received: 28 August 2014 / Accepted: 13 January 2015 # Academic Psychiatry 2015
The purpose of this report is to describe a social mediafacilitated book group collaboration between graduate psychiatry trainees at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the USA and the South London and Maudsley National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust in the UK. Having an international venue to share culturally based observations and ideas about psychiatric texts enhances traditional graduate medical education methods and provides a model for life-long learning. Social media tools, which allow for dissemination of information and exchange of ideas among a global network of participants, are ideal for overcoming temporal and geographic barriers to international collaboration [1]. Several studies have shown the benefits of integrating social media into medical education [2]. Incorporating these tools allows medical trainees to engage and contribute to their own learning, which is considered one of the most effective methods of teaching [3]. Group discussions, especially through social media, are underutilized throughout the education system [4]. With this in mind, Johns Hopkins approached the Maudsley training program to create a new social mediafacilitated branch of the Maudsley’s existing Reading the Mind book group. Each branch conducts in-person meetings and the two branches communicate with one another via an interactive Twitter account and blogs. Combining in-person group discussion of seminal psychiatric texts with asynchronous discussion via Twitter and blogs has enabled the Johns Hopkins and Maudsley graduate trainees to create a forum for integrated, transcontinental education. R. Lal : M. E. Peters (*) : M. S. Chisolm Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Kan Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, London, UK
Case Description The South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust is a massive training scheme, consisting of 120 posts in postgraduate years 1–3 (core training stage) and another 100 posts in postgraduate years 4–6 (specialist training stage). Over the past several years, strong curricular emphasis has been placed on developing clinical competencies and meeting the UK’s Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists requirements. Limited resources in the curriculum were dedicated to learning about critical concepts in the development and history of psychiatry. Anecdotal evidence suggested that the Maudsley psychiatric trainees wanted to expand their education in areas of psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and neuroscience, among others. Thus, in March 2011, the Maudsley Reading the Mind book group was born. The facilitators of Reading the Mind consist of self-selected Maudsley psychiatric trainees, from across all training years. A list of titles of possible book group reading selections was compiled from various sources, including the British Journal of Psychiatry [5, 6] and personal recommendations from senior academics/clinicians. The initial title chosen for the group was The Divided Self by RD Laing and, since then, participants have read a range of books on topics such as philosophy (Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennet), the antipsychiatry movement (Doctoring the Mind by Richard Bentall), and psychoanalysis (Studies on Hysteria by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer). Meetings are scheduled bimonthly and titles are chosen for the next meeting from the list by meeting attendees. Meetings are held on training site grounds and, on average, 15 trainees attend each meeting, although attendance has ranged from 7–29 trainees per meeting. Each 60-min meeting of the group begins with initial impressions of the selected text followed by an in-depth
Acad Psychiatry
discussion about its content and relevance to psychiatry. In September 2013, after 84 meetings of Reading the Mind, a focus group of eight Maudsley trainees was interviewed to obtain feedback on the book group. Participants reported that they were not only more likely to read extra-curricular materials, but were even applying concepts explored in the book group to clinical situations. The results of this focus group helped support the leaders’ impressions of its utility in psychiatric training [7]. Maudsley and John Hopkins have a long history of collaboration. Each psychiatry training program offers an exchange of trainees for 6 months of academic research or educational scholarship with the other institution. When Hopkins faculty member and one of this report’s authors (MC) discovered the existence of the Reading the Mind book group via the Maudsley group’s Twitter account @Maudsley_RTM, she contacted the account’s leader and one of this report’s authors (CK) to discuss the possibility of forming a branch of the book group at Hopkins, in an effort to further the link between the two institutions. After e-mail and Skype conversations, a social media-facilitated international collaboration between the two training programs was born and, in July 2013, Johns Hopkins officially announced the formation of the Hopkins branch of Reading the Mind. A core leadership group of Johns Hopkins residents (at least one from each postgraduate year) was formed and agreed that initially, the Hopkins book group members would read the book title chosen by the Maudsley. The Hopkins trainees were invited to contribute titles to the master list from which books are selected. Some of the more recent works discussed by both branches include Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl and Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology by Russell Jacoby. Both branches also have had authors come to discuss their works in person. Because of the collaboration, Hopkins was able to facilitate their faculty member Kay Redfield Jamison’s appearance with her book, An Unquiet Mind, at both the Hopkins and Maudsley branch meetings of the book group. In addition, one of the Maudsley Reading the Mind co-founders, Lisa Conlan, attended a Hopkins branch meeting in the USA; and a Hopkins faculty member and one of the authors of this report (MC) attended a Maudsley branch meeting in the UK. The Johns Hopkins branch meetings are held in the evening at the faculty advisor’s home. Each meeting lasts 90 min, with the first 30 min devoted to dinner and socialization and the remaining 60 min to discussion of the text. On average, 10 trainees attend each meeting, although attendance has ranged from 6–19 trainees per meeting. The faculty advisor livetweets highlights of the discussion using the Twitter hashtag #rtmind, which was developed specifically for Reading the Mind so that interested trainees from the Maudsley branch (whose meeting discussing the same book occurs about 5 days following the Hopkins meeting) and the public can follow and
join in the discussion, if desired. Use of the Twitter hashtag has enabled discussion and learning points to occur asynchronously and irrespective of physical distance between the two group’s meetings. Twitter has also been used to facilitate discussion about book with relevant authors and to refine the booklist. Altogether, Twitter has facilitated a vibrant continuous and international conversation about books relevant to psychiatry, has informed understanding of differing cultural viewpoints, and has encouraged intellectual debate among a diverse group of learners. The sharing of ideas has fostered a new form of active learning literally accessible from the palms of the participants’ hands. In addition to Twitter, the book group has used other social media tools to enhance reflection and collaboration between the US and UK trainees. Maudsley trainees who formed the Reading the Mind book group also created a blog The Art of Psychiatry Society and the Reading The Mind Book Group (www.artofpsychiatry.co.uk) to explore the shared elements between the arts and psychiatry. In addition to reporting on other broader activities of the Society, the blog announces the book group’s upcoming titles and summarizes the group’s discussions after each meeting. In July 2013, a blog specific to the Maudsley Reading the Mind book group was launched (http://maudsleyreadingthemind.wordpress.com) and includes a page devoted to the Hopkins branch, as well as the newly minted Verona branch, of the group. In addition to Twitter and blogs, the Hopkins branch has used the social media platform Storify, which enables a narrative to be built around selected tweets using a specific hashtag, to capture their discussion and to create a summary of the meeting to post to the Maudsley blogs.
Discussion In the last 10 years, Facebook traffic has exploded with 1.28 billion current monthly active users and social media has steadily become more popular [8]. Social media tools are already widely used by medical trainees [9], as they enable easy sharing of opinions, ideas, multimedia resources, and references on an international level. Several studies have shown the benefits of integrating social media into medical education [3, 10, 11]. Social media allows medical trainees to engage and contribute to their own learning, which is considered one of the most effective methods of teaching [3]. This potential has stimulated medical professionals to experiment with social media, using Twitter journal clubs, live-tweeting from and blogging about scientific meetings, and Google Hangout panel discussions, to enhance undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education. Entire online communities of medical learners have been created using social media-facilitated communication, including such exemplars as Academic Life in Emergency Medicine (ALiEM) (www.aliem.com) and the
Acad Psychiatry
General Internal Medicine Connect for the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) (www.aliem.com). ALiEM has hosted the Global Emergency Medicine Journal Club since 2013 [12, 13] and SGIM’s journal club debuted in 2014 [4], both of which are perceived as highly successful forums for furthering medical education. In addition to physicians, other health care professionals are using social media to enhance education and discovery [14, 15]. One notable example especially relevant to this report is the Social Work Book Group, which was founded in 2012 at the University of Central Lancashire’s undergraduate social work program [16]. This meeting of 40 participants is live-streamed three times a year to six other universities across the UK. In addition, the group has established a Twitter account @SWBookGroup, which serves to engage the wider social work community and further expand discussion. As health care professionals and trainees begin to venture into the world of social media, they must be aware of the public, permanent, and amplified nature of such communication and the challenges these tools pose to professionalism, including the potential risks to patient privacy and the blurring of professional and personal boundaries [17, 18]. In response to these concerns, societies of physicians around the world, including the USA and UK, have developed guidelines regarding the professional use of social media [19, 20]. Integrating medicine’s core cultural values of confidentiality, privacy, and one-to-one interactions with social media’s cultural values of connection, sharing, transparency, openness, and informality does present potential challenges [21]. However, when medical education curricula using social media have been implemented and evaluated, the pre-implementation concerns regarding medical professionalism have waned in comparison to those regarding technical problems of the actual implementation [22]. Balancing the values of medicine and the potential of social media is an evolving process that will continue to be refined. Specific training regarding social media professionalism and consistent long-term studies of the risks and benefits of these tools will be essential to inform the use of social media in medical education [4, 23]. In this social media-facilitated US and UK book group collaboration, trainees from both countries have noted challenges to collaboration arising from their location in different time zones. In addition, although both branches have expressed a desire for their respective groups to meet more frequently, this has been challenging due to the intense clinical time demands on both the US and UK trainees. Taking all this into account, Reading the Mind continues to evolve and make improvements each year. Future directions include the decision by the Johns Hopkins branch to choose some titles independently from the Maudsley branch. This decision arose at first by necessity, when the two branches needed to read An Unquiet Mind 1 month apart to accommodate Dr. Jamison’s travel schedule. The first independently selected title by the
Hopkins branch was Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home, which represented a radically different genre for the book group. Since then, the Hopkins branch has begun curating a new list of books, using the Maudsley branch’s list as its base and has been considering including works of fiction such as Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Given the trainees’ desire to meet more frequently, the Hopkins residents have also decided to meet more frequently and so, in the 2014–2015 academic year, the Hopkins branch of Reading the Mind will convene monthly. The Hopkins branch has also developed its own blog (www.hopkinsreadingthemind.com), whose reflective essays on the meetings will be cross-posted to the Maudsley blog. Finally, the Hopkins branch hopes to explore ways of linking to a print journal to publish brief book reviews and discussion points, which could link to social media-based discussions. More than a passing fad, social media tools are allowing healthcare professionals and trainees to communicate and learn from one other, despite constraints such as distance and time. The Maudsley–Johns Hopkins Reading the Mind book group collaboration is an innovative example of how ideas and values can be shared and built upon through social media. The reflections coming from these discussions, both in person and online, cultivate the core knowledge, values, and skills essential to professional development and foster the shared desire of all trainees to become clinically excellent psychiatrists. Implications for Educators • Medical educators need more innovative teaching tools to facilitate deeper learning outside of clinical and traditional didactic settings. • The book group format demonstrates the values of collaborative peerto-peer learning in developing critical thinking. • Twitter feeds and blogs are an effective method of having these discussions continue outside the live group setting and encourage international collaborations.
Funding No funding or other support was received for this project. The UK branch of the book club receives funding from the Maudsley Charity. Disclosures Dr. Kan receives salary support from Novo Nordisk UK Research Foundation.
References 1. Frankish K, Ryan C, Harris A. Psychiatry and online social media: potential, pitfalls and ethical guidelines for psychiatrists and trainees. Australas Psychiatry. 2012;20(3):181–7. 2. Cheston CC, Flickinger TE, Chisolm MS. Social media use in medical education: a systematic review. Academic Medicine. 2013;88: 893.
Acad Psychiatry 3. Potts HW. Student experiences of creating and sharing material in online learning. Med Teach. 2011;33(11):e607–14. 4. Chretien KC, Kind T. Social media and clinical care: ethical, professional, and social implications. Circulation. 2013;127(13):1413–21. 5. Gelder M. Ten books. British Journal of Psychiatry. 2003;183:269. 6. Wessely S. Ten books. The British Journal of Psychiatry. 2002;181: 81. 7. Kan C, Harrison S, Robinson B, Barnes A, Chisolm M, Conlan L. The use of a trainee-led book group as a supplementary education tool for psychiatric training in the 21st century. Medical Teacher 2014. 8. Facebook Newsroom. Facebook newsroom. . Retrieved April 30th 2014. 9. MacDonald J, Sohn S, Ellis P. Privacy, professionalism and Facebook: a dilemma for young doctors. Med Educ. 2010;8(44):805. 10. McGee JB, Begg M. What medical educators need to know about "Web 2.0". Med Teach. 2008;30(2):164–9. 11. Varga-Atkins T, Dangerfield P, Brigden D. Developing professionalism through the use of wikis: a study with first-year undergraduate medical students. Med Teach. 2010;32(10):824–9. 12. Mehta N, Flickinger T. The times they are a-changin': academia, social media and the JGIM Twitter Journal Club. J Gen Intern Med. 2014;5. 13. Radecki RP, Rezaie SR, Lin M. Annals of Emergency Medicine Journal Club. Global Emergency Medicine Journal Club: Social media responses to the November 2013 Annals of Emergency Medicine Journal Club. Ann Emerg Med. 2014;63(4):490–4. 14. Ferguson C, Inglis SC, Newton PJ, Cripps PJ, MacDonald PS, Davidson PM. Social media: a tool to spread information: a case
15.
16.
17. 18. 19.
20.
21. 22.
23.
study analysis of Twitter conversation at the Cardiac Society of Australia & New Zealand 61st annual scientific meeting 2013. Collegian. 2014;21(2):89–93. Casella E, Mills J, Usher K. Social media and nursing practice: changing the balance between the social and technical aspects of work. Collegian. 2014;21(2):121–6. Taylor A. The social work book group: using fiction to support learning. 2014; Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/social-carenetwork/social-life-blog/2014/jun/06/social-work-book-group Crotty BH, Mostaghimi A, Arora VM. Online identities of physicians. JAMA. 2013;310(23):2566–7. DeCamp M, Koenig TW, Chisolm MS. Social media and physicians’ online identity crisis. JAMA. 2013;310(6):581–2. Cunningham AM. General medical council: doctors use of social media. 2014; Available at: http://www.gmc-uk.org/guidance/10900. asp Hatwell K. American Medical Association: New AMA policy helps guide physicians’ use of social media. 2010; Available at: http:// www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/news/news/social-media-policy.page. Accessed 11/02. Hughes B, Joshi I, Wareham J. Health 2.0 and Medicine 2.0: tensions and controversies in the field. J Med Internet Res. 2008;10(3):e23. Roy D, Taylor J, Cheston C, Flinkinger T, Chisolm M. Social media: portrait of an emerging tool in medical education. Acad Psychiatr 2014. In press. Kind T. Social media milestones: entrusting trainees to conduct themselves responsibly and professionally. J Grad Med Educ. 2014;6(1): 170–1.
