History
The University of Colorado School of Medicine opened in 1883, and graduated its first two students two years later. The Department of Psychiatry of the University of Colorado Denver was founded in 1919 by the Colorado Legislature. The hospital opened six years later as one of the original Psychopathic Hospitals in the United States. The psychiatric hospital changed its name to the Colorado Psychiatric Hospital to reflect changing times and ideas, and remains a clinical unit of the Department of Psychiatry and University of Colorado Hospital.
In its early days, the orientation of the Department of Psychiatry and the Colorado Psychiatric Hospital were almost exclusively psychoanalytic in treatment methods and theories. In fact, our academic department is one of the few academic departments of psychiatry in the country with a psychoanalytic institute as a clinical and teaching entity still active.
Over the years our orientation has broadened to include clinical treatment, research and teaching in many other areas, including biological psychiatry, cognitive-behavioral and interpersonal therapies, cultural psychiatry, child psychiatry and many other areas of modern mental health.
One of the largest departments of psychiatry in the United States, we employ over one hundred and fifty regular faculty and more than three hundred clinical faculty members. We maintain training programs in psychology, psychiatry and social work at the predoctoral and postdoctoral levels.
We take pride in our graduates and faculty members who include deans of medical schools, chairs of departments of psychiatry in other schools, directors of the National Institute of Mental Health and prominent researchers, teachers and clinicians around the world.
