New patients
Your care begins with a comprehensive evaluation to clarify what you are seeking, assess your situation, and settle on a shared plan of action.
We are an academic medical center. As a teaching hospital, you may meet with a psychiatric resident or medical student. We provide assessments and focused interventions that include:
- Licensed clinical social workers
- Medical students
- Psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners
- Psychiatric residents
- Psychologists
- Staff psychiatrists
Note: We recommend contacting your health insurance company to confirm your coverage before scheduling an appointment.
Before your first appointment
To make our initial evaluations more efficient and effective, we will ask you for some information before the appointment. This includes:
- Intake packets
- Questionnaires
- Previous testing reports
- Contact information
At your first visit, we may also ask you to fill out a questionnaire so we can track your progress over time. You can complete this questionnaire on a small tablet computer in the office or from your own computer through myDH.
It would also be helpful for you to bring a list of your medications and their dosage, or the medications themselves, to the first visit.
During your first appointment
You will meet with your clinician in a private room, where they will provide you with some information about what will be discussed at the appointment, information about confidentiality, and seek to understand your history.
These are the topics that are typically covered at the first appointment:
- Contributing factors
- Current medications and any medication allergies
- Experience with nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, and drugs
- General medical history
- History of current symptoms or difficulties
- Past psychiatric history
- Reason for coming to the appointment
- Social history, such as living situation, work or school, family and friendships, and educational history
- Trauma history
The clinician will then work with you to put it all together and create a plan for the next steps.
Next steps often include gathering more history, consulting with others, sharing the pros and cons of treatment options, and beginning treatment, if that treatment makes sense to both of you. Sometimes, you and your provider will conclude that the care you need is offered outside of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center and Dartmouth Hitchcock Clinics. If this is the case, our clinic staff will assist you in connecting with that source of care.