Community Track
Overview: This track offers a unique and immersive training experience for psychiatry residents who are passionate about improving mental health care for underserved and marginalized populations. Through the HOPE Clinic, a resident-led, community-focused psychiatric clinic, participants will gain hands-on experience delivering outpatient care to individuals facing complex psychosocial and structural challenges.
The track emphasizes:
- Community-based clinical care
- Interdisciplinary collaboration
- Systems-level thinking
- Leadership in outreach and healthcare equity
- Direct collaboration with local shelter systems and substance use rehabilitation services
Residents will engage with patients who experience homelessness, substance use disorders, and other complex barriers to care. This integrated approach prepares future leaders in public sector psychiatry and advocates for equitable access to mental health care.
Goals:
- Provide High-Quality Outpatient Care: Develop resident skills in the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of individuals with serious mental illness and comorbid psychosocial stressors.
- Understand Social Determinants of Health: Foster a nuanced understanding of how housing insecurity, unemployment, trauma, and systemic barriers impact psychiatric care.
- Deliver Collaborative, Multidisciplinary Care: Encourage teamwork among psychiatry residents, social workers, case managers, and primary care providers.
- Develop Leadership in Clinic Operations: Offer residents structured opportunities to lead clinic operations, scheduling, and outreach coordination.
- Promote Systems-Based Practice: Prepare residents to engage with community partners and understand public mental health infrastructure and funding streams.
Core Curriculum:
- Clinical Rotation
- PGY-3: HOPE Clinic – Biweekly Outreach Clinic: Residents will participate in a biweekly outpatient community psychiatry clinic focused on serving underserved populations. This includes continuity care for patients experiencing barriers such as housing insecurity, lack of insurance, and limited access to traditional health services. Residents will take an active role in managing patient care, coordinating follow-up, and participating in clinic operations and planning.
- Supervision: Ongoing clinical oversight by attending psychiatrists with expertise in community mental health.
- Integrated Community Psychiatry Didactics: Focused educational sessions on public psychiatry, systems of care, and outreach-based models.
- Academic Activities
- Participation in community outreach efforts through collaboration with Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries, providing psychiatric care in shelter settings and working directly with vulnerable populations.
- Structured opportunities to learn how to operate and lead a resident-run psychiatric clinic, including workflow coordination, scheduling, and managing interdisciplinary team dynamics.
- Mentorship: Quarterly meetings with the Community Psychiatry Track Director to support professional development in public sector psychiatry.
Track Residents
During residency, we often meet patients in the crisis center or inpatient unit during the most destabilizing points in their lives - moments when housing insecurity, substance use, financial hardship, and other socioeconomic challenges profoundly shape both their access to care and their psychiatric outcomes. These encounters have shown me that mental health treatment must extend beyond the hospital walls, which is why I’m deeply passionate about community psychiatry. I serve as one of the lead coordinators of our resident-run free psychiatric clinic, HOPE Clinic which was established last year in partnership with the Detroit Rescue Mission. This upcoming year, I will be serving as co-chief medical director of the clinic to continue my work with HOPE clinic. Through this clinic, we provide transitional psychiatric care to individuals staying in shelters and substance use treatment centers; people who are often navigating multiple layers of adversity with very limited resources. I find it very gratifying to be able to help provide some support, whether it be in the form of therapy or medications, to these people who are experiencing some of the darkest moments of their lives. Being part of this work has been one of the most meaningful aspects of my training. It has deepened my commitment to health equity and reminded me that delivering compassionate, community-based care can be a powerful force for change.
My interest in community psychiatry has been driven and strengthened by the profound disparities my coresidents and I witness every day as we train and practice in Detroit. It is devastating to see the persistent effects of inadequate socioeconomic resources and psychosocial support, including repeated decompensations into psychosis and relapses into maladaptive cycles, that may have been prevented with the appropriate support. My goals for clinical practice are grounded in the belief that psychiatric care must be accessible, culturally attuned, and rooted in the realities of the communities we serve. Volunteering through HOPE clinic has deepened this commitment, providing another context through which to engage meaningfully with people experiencing homelessness, trauma, addiction, and severe mental illness, many of whom have been marginalized by traditional systems of care. These experiences have reinforced my dedication to practicing psychiatry not only as a clinical discipline but also as a form of advocacy and structural intervention, working alongside patients to reduce barriers and promote mental wellness within underserved populations.
Track Director
A 1990 graduate of the WSU School of Medicine, Dr. McIntyre Leon joined the faculty in 2014. She currently serves as an Assistant professor and associate chair of Community Affairs in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, is the interim chair of the Wayne State University School of Medicine’s Department of Neurosurgery. She has served as chief medical director for the Detroit Wayne Mental Health Authority, Southwest Counseling Solutions, Community Network Services, the St. Joseph Mercy Network and Boniface Human Services. Dr. McIntyre Leon also serves as the Human Services Collaborative Committee co-chair for the Steering Committee for Wayne County Providers of Services to Children, Youth and Families.
Dr. Mcintyre leads the WSU Public Psychiatry Fellowship.