Street Psychiatry
Partnering with Chicago Street Medicine – UIC chapter, Revive Center for Housing and Healing, and Community Outreach Intervention Projects (COIP), UIC adult psychiatry residency designed a longitudinal clinic and elective rotation that trains resident psychiatrists in Street Psychiatry, the practice of delivering psychiatric and substance use disorder treatment directly to people experiencing homelessness. Starting in 2025 and led by a PGY4 resident, Dr. Chris Hensler, MD, this clinical experience combines two training settings that are novel to our program and, currently, novel to other Chicago psychiatry residencies: examination and management of primary mental illness and substance use disorders in a free walk-in clinic for people experiencing homelessness and via street level outreach. This experience is supervised and mentored by Dr. Samuel Jackson, MD, who completed the Columbia Public Psychiatry Fellowship, has experience treating this population in NYC, and has led the charge to establish Street Psychiatry in Chicago.
This unique experience gives residents the opportunity to meet patients where they're at, seeing them in their environment, and to better understand the barriers of care that exist in traditional treatment settings. Residents will be able to triage and manage acute crisis, agitation, and intoxication, become competent in administering long-acting injectable medications, and managing psychotropics for patients living unsheltered. Residents get to work in a multidisciplinary team of case managers, social workers, occupational therapists, nurse practitioners, peer navigators/advocates, and medical students. They also teach team members and medical students in the basics of mental health care as well as safety and agitation de-escalation. There are also several scholarship opportunities to help demonstrate the progress of our efforts doing Street Psychiatry in Chicago. Further, residents will get to network with several community and national partner organizations aligned with helping address the needs of the homeless population in the city, including the Chicago Department of Public Health, Illinois Department of Family and Support Services, and the Street Mental Health Coalition.