Acad Psychiatry (2016) 40:141–144
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 / Published online: 5 March 2015
# Academic Psychiatry 2015
The purpose of this report is to describe a social media-
facilitated book group collaboration between graduate psychi-
atry trainees at the Johns Hopkins University School of Med-
icine in the USA and the South London and Maudsley Na-
tional Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust in the UK.
Having an international venue to share culturally based obser-
vations 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 dissem-
ination of information and exchange of ideas among a global
network of participants, are ideal for overcoming temporal
and geographic barriers to international collaboration [1]. Sev-
eral studies have shown the benefits of integrating social me-
dia into medical education [2]. Incorporating these tools al-
lows 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 educa-
tion system [4]. With this in mind, Johns Hopkins approached
the Maudsley training program to create a new social media-
facilitated 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 asynchro-
nous 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: matthew.peters@jhmi.edu
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 postgrad-
uate 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 learn-
ing 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, anthro-
pology, 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 se-
nior academics/clinicians. The initial title chosen for the group
was The Divided Self by RD Laing and, since then, partici-
pants have read a range of books on topics such as philosophy
(Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennet), the anti-
psychiatry 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 meet-
ing. Each 60-min meeting of the group begins with initial
impressions of the selected text followed by an in-depth
142
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 mate-
rials, 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 psychi-
atric training [7].
Maudsley and John Hopkins have a long history of collab-
oration. 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 so-
cial 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 Hop-
kins branch meeting in the USA; and a Hopkins faculty mem-
ber 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 eve-
ning 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 live-
tweets 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
Acad Psychiatry (2016) 40:141–144
join in the discussion, if desired. Use of the Twitter hashtag
has enabled discussion and learning points to occur asynchro-
nously and irrespective of physical distance between the two
group’s meetings. Twitter has also been used to facilitate dis-
cussion about book with relevant authors and to refine the
booklist. Altogether, Twitter has facilitated a vibrant continu-
ous 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 al-
ready widely used by medical trainees [9], as they enable easy
sharing of opinions, ideas, multimedia resources, and refer-
ences 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 pan-
el discussions, to enhance undergraduate, graduate, and con-
tinuing medical education. Entire online communities of med-
ical 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 (2016) 40:141–144
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 re-
port 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 ac-
count @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 communica-
tion 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 re-
garding the professional use of social media [19, 20]. Integrat-
ing 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 informal-
ity does present potential challenges [21]. However, when
medical education curricula using social media have been im-
plemented and evaluated, the pre-implementation concerns
regarding medical professionalism have waned in comparison
to those regarding technical problems of the actual implemen-
tation [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 professional-
ism 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 chal-
lenges 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 deci-
sion by the Johns Hopkins branch to choose some titles inde-
pendently 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
143
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 curat-
ing 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 peer-
to-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.
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