University of Alabama at Birmingham Residents Take Top Honors at MindGames


This receptor is tightly bound by kratom, which led the FDA to issue a warning on kratom’s potential for abuse.

(Don’t know the answer? See the end of this article.)

That’s one of the questions (technically, answers) posed to residents from Duke University, East Carolina University, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), at the 12th Annual MindGames competition held tonight at APA’s 2018 Annual Meeting.

UAB emerged victorious in a competition that pits residents from psychiatry programs across the country against each other with questions about medicine in general and psychiatry in particular. The event has become a popular attraction at the Annual Meeting. Pictured with the trophy after the competition are (from left) UAB residents Charles Davis, M.D., Jennifer Hadley, M.D., and Michael Falola, M.D.

Judges for the competition were past APA President Michelle Riba, M.D.; Richard Balon, M.D., director of psychiatry residency training at Wayne State University; and Marcy Verduin, M.D., assistant dean for students at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine. The moderator and host was Art Walaszek, M.D., director of psychiatry training at the University of Wisconsin.

MindGames is open to all psychiatry residency programs in the United States and Canada. The preliminary competition for this year’s game began in February, when teams of three residents took a 60-minute online test consisting of 150 multiple-choice questions. The questions follow the ABPN Part I content outline, covering both psychiatry and neurology, with a few difficult history-of-psychiatry questions. The winners were the three top-scoring teams with the fastest posted times.

Residents competing for Duke University were Erik Larsson, M.D., Alexandra Bey, M.D., Ph.D., and Paul Riordan, M.D.; and for East Carolina University, Vikas Gupta, M.D., M.P.H., Rachel Gooding, M.D., and Roopma Wadhwa, M.D.

The correct answer is “What is the mu receptor?”

(Image: David Hathcox)