This week features a guide for clinicians struggling to navigate the halls of academia, an update on U.S. valproic acid prescriptions, and a case study on balancing ethics and pragmatism.
How Practicing Clinicians Can Navigate Academic Promotion
New research in The Primary Care Companion for CNS Disorders offers a practical, ground-level guide for clinicians who want to pursue academic promotion, but aren’t sure where to start, or whether it’s even worth the effort.
Drawing on a case vignette and decades of experience at the crossroads of medicine and psychiatry, authors from Massachusetts General Hospital and affiliated institutions argue that academic advancement isn’t simply a race for prestige. For practicing clinicians, promotion means leadership opportunities, job security, and a broader platform for teaching, mentorship, and system-level impact.
It can also boost institutional culture by reinforcing quality patient care, education, and professional engagement.
The authors lay out the most common barriers that keep clinicians from pursuing promotion, including overwhelming clinical workloads, muddled promotion criteria, a dearth of mentorship, imposter syndrome, and burnout. These challenges disproportionately affect early-career physicians, women, and clinicians from underrepresented groups.
The authors also stress that many clinicians already meet promotion criteria through teaching, clinical leadership, committee work, and educational outreach. But most of them fail to recognize it.
Rather than focusing narrowly on traditional research output, the authors highlight multiple pathways to promotion, including clinician-educator and clinician-administrator tracks. They outline concrete strategies to build a promotion portfolio: aligning projects with career goals, turning everyday clinical work into scholarship, leveraging mentorship and sponsorship, and using a “divide and conquer” approach to writing and presentations.
Ultimately, the authors reframe academic promotion as a skill set. They argue that anyone can learn it and adapt it to different professional identities. With the right guidance and institutional backing, the authors argue, academic advancement is both attainable and meaningful for practicing clinicians seeking to extend their influence beyond the exam room.
IN OTHER PSYCHIATRY AND NEUROLOGY NEWS
- Despite a sharp decline in overall prescribing, nearly one in five valproic acid prescriptions in the United States still go to females of reproductive age and the vast majority of these patients aren’t using contraception.
- The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry reports expert consensus recommendations on psychosocial treatments for schizophrenia, with a focus on improving functional recovery.
- A PCC case report describes how a psychiatrist used a manic patient’s fear of being associated with religious extremism to redirect harmful behavior and restore treatment engagement.
- And in a letter to the editor of JCP, readers comment on a recent article that argues that finasteride is causally linked to depression, suicidality, and other neuropsychiatric reactions.
- And check out the most recent episode of “The JCP Podcast,” to listen in on our chat about ADHD with Margaret Sibley, PhD.
