Message from the Director

Richard J. Lee, M.D.

It is with great warmth and excitement that I welcome you to the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship Program. In line with the mission of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences, the highest priority of our fellowship program is in the education and well being of our child psychiatry fellows. Our fellows will have no on call duties as our program was designed "from the ground up" to provide a broad and comprehensive training experience across our innovative treatment platforms within the children’s programs at the Riverside University Health System and UCR Health.

With the support of our department chairman, Gerald Maguire, M.D., we have been able to recruit a large and diverse faculty group from top training programs and institutions across the United States. Our faculty members have dedicated time for teaching and share in our mission of providing developmentally appropriate, culturally competent care. Child psychiatry fellows will have our full support and encouragement to pursue scholarly activities and to participate in research. It is our goal for our graduating fellows to become leaders in the field in child and adolescent psychiatry.

Riverside County is one of the largest, most populous and most diverse counties in the United States, but yet it is also one of the most underserved in terms of children’s behavioral healthcare needs. Our fellowship takes aim at reducing the existing health care disparities by bringing excellence and innovation to our currently underserved population.

From our mobile parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT) treatment teams to our innovative TAY Drop in Centers for First Episode Psychosis, from our completely integrated children’s behavioral health clinic to our state of the art outpatient offices at UCR Health that feature groundbreaking telemedicine opportunities, we are extremely excited about our current systems of care and are passionate about the improving the health and wellness of children throughout Riverside County, both now and into the future.

I invite you to apply to join the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship Program and join our family at the UCR School of Medicine. If I can answer any questions for you, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

Richard J. Lee, M.D.
Program Director

Message from the Vice Chair

Carl Feinstein, M.D.

Welcome to Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at U.C. Riverside.

The study and practice of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry is an exciting opportunity to deepen our understanding of all psychiatry while specializing in diagnosing and treating the mental health needs of young people during the formative periods of their lives. This is when the opportunities for improving psychiatric and psychosocial outcomes are greatest ("bending the curve"). It is an opportunity to learn how people become the way they grow up to be, by integrating our knowledge of neurobiology and pharmacology with the reciprocal influences of multigenerational family roots, current family dynamics, and the environmental, and cultural influences that shape development.

We move past treating the individual patient from a cross-sectional view as an isolated neurobiological entity, to seeing every patient as vitally and continuously influenced by the parenting they experience, their culture, and the sociological forces that can either enhance their development or trap them into a cycle of lost opportunities and psychosocial adversity. We learn that “no child is an island”, and that, in order to offer children effective psychiatric care, we must form a treatment alliance not only with them, but with their parents and other vital care providers. This may include advocating for them at their schools and social service agencies, as well. We must also always strive to integrate their mental health care with their medical care and rehabilitative services. So, we come to see ourselves as a vital part of the system of care, rather than solo practitioners whose responsibility ends at the door of our offices. We not only help children with their current distress, but we help them build healthy futures.

These are our values at UCR Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. We look forward to hearing from you.

Carl Feinstein, M.D.
Clinical Professor
Vice Chair, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry