Three physicians from the joint psychiatry residency program for UNMC/Creighton University won the 2015 MindGames competition at the American Psychiatric Association’s 2015 annual meeting in Toronto earlier this month.
The winning participants in the “Jeopardy”-like quiz competition were Venkata Kolli, M.D., Varun Monga, M.D., and Rohit Madan, M.D. They won with an exciting, come-from-behind victory after wagering 3,000 points on the final MindGames question and giving the correct answer to “Name the brain region activated when an individual is in a resting state.” (Answer: Default Mode Network).
They defeated residents from New York Presbyterian Hospital (Columbia Campus)/New York State Psychiatric Institute and New York Presbyterian Hospital (Cornell Campus).
“This was a great accomplishment,” said Steve Wengel, M.D., professor and chairman of the UNMC Department of Psychiatry. “To win the competition, our resident physicians had to defeat teams from two Ivy League schools – Columbia and Cornell – in the finals. Obviously, that is no small feat, and it speaks very highly for the quality of our residents.”
MindGames is open to all psychiatry residency programs in the United States and Canada. The preliminary online competition began in February when teams of three residents took a 60-minute online test consisting of 100 multiple-choice questions.
The top three teams qualified for the finals. Finalists were announced last month at the annual meeting of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training.
Here’s a sample of some of the questions asked during the competition with answers listed under the questions:
What are two risk factors associated with higher risk of seasonal affective disorder?
Who wrote the book An Unquiet Mind?
What ethnic group has the lowest risk of completed suicides?
(Answers: Younger age and higher geographical latitude; Kay Jamison, Ph.D.; Hispanics).
Here’s a video of the exciting final question, which won the event for the UNMC/Creighton residents. Read the story in Psychiatric News Update.