FEATURE: LETTER TO THE EDITOR Carla Marienfeld & Robert Rohrbaugh Received: 17 December 2014 /Accepted: 6 February 2015 /Published online: 14 March 2015 # Academic Psychiatry 2015 To the Editor: Academic Psychiatry has become a leader in publishing arti- cles related to the promotion and responsible development of global mental health programs in psychiatric residency train- ing [1–9]. Without this vital academic discourse, the quality of training and experience for US residents may suffer, and the impact of the program on the collaborating country may be diminished. Van Dyke et al. outlined both the justification for and value of global mental health programs in US training, as well as important components in developing such programs [1]. In the August 2014 volume of the Academic Psychiatry, Tsai and colleagues published a paper titled “Global Health Training in US Graduate Psychiatric Education” [2] that pro- vides additional important insights into global mental health training. Despite the authors’ explicit intention to “systemati- cally assess” current training opportunities, we believe the methodology available for this type of evaluation and the methodology employed limited the yield of important infor- mation relevant to the accurate characterization of current global mental health programs. Additional considerations in- clude funding, collaborating countries, international collabo- rations and program values, and preparation before going abroad, as follows: Funding: Several programs are noted to provide a travel stipend. However, funding to cover salary, malpractice, and benefits during these experiences or funding for any research or educational activities that are completed is not assessed beyond mention of some programs that utilize R25 funded “research tracks.” Funding is a critical factor affecting the ability of the program to provide enriching and viable opportunities. Collaborating countries: Representative collaborative sites are listed for programs based, presumably, on avail- able information from website review and Google searches. However, our website at the time of the search listed several countries where residents had global mental health experiences though the article only mentioned one site. Our own publication from 2013 (which would not have been found through this paper’ s methodology) also listed several other sites [3]. We suggest that website re- view may not be the best source of information for this level of program data. International collaborations and program values: The ar- ticle outlines limitations of programs that promote psy- chiatry resident participation in preestablished clinical elective programs administered by other medical depart- ments or through the medical school. Although the ease of having a “single infrastructure” is appreciated, treat- ment of most psychiatric illness requires deep under- standing of the cultural context and system of care and must attend to the longitudinal course of most psychiatric illness. Although 1-month clinical electives in interna- tional settings are easily cataloged on a website, the ben- efits of international experiences that promote scholarly work, capacity building, and sustained collaboration are harder to capture using this methodology. Preparation before going abroad: The authors acknowl- edge the importance of “…specific didactic training, mentored scholarly activity, and field experiences … C. Marienfeld (*) : R. Rohrbaugh Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: marienfeld@gmail.com Acad Psychiatry (2015) 39:345–346 DOI 10.1007/s40596-015-0317-x A Call for Better Methodology for Global Mental Health Educational Program Reviews