Survivor Surveillance: A Resident's Perspective

With the surge in popularity and utility of the interdisciplinary approach to cancer care, finding psychiatry's role can often times be difficult. This may be in part because psychiatry's role is not yet specifically delineated or standardized in such a team-based approach. This case explores the challenges of learning what this role may be and how to tailor one's psychiatric care to meet a patient's needs, all from the perspective of a general psychiatry resident. A possible issue in actualizing these two skills is the apparent medicalization of distress, which is discussed, as is the added issue of the relative naivete of one in training. This article hopes to aid general psychiatrists and specifically general psychiatry residents in realizing their importance in the interdisciplinary cancer care team setting and provide some examples of how one can be an effective and useful member in such a team.