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Medical Students Now Watch Seinfeld to Learn About Psychiatric Disorders

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Seinfeld
From "The Junior Mint" episode, pictured: (upper left) Jerry Seinfeld as Jerry Seinfeld, Michael Richards as Cosmo Kramer.Spike Nannarello/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank—Getty Images
By Olivia B. Waxman

Aspiring doctors now have an excuse to binge-watch Seinfeld.

At Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., psychiatry professor Anthony Tobia is teaching third and fourth-year medical students in the hospital’s psychiatric rotation about psychiatric disorders through the hit TV show’s eccentric characters — an exercise dubbed “Psy-feld,” NJ.com reports.

The students are required to watch two repeat episodes of the show a week on TBS and come to class ready to discuss the psychopathology “demonstrated” in each one. As Tobia told NJ.com,

“When you get these friends together the dynamic is such that it literally creates a plot: Jerry’s obsessive compulsive traits combined with Kramer’s schizoid traits, with Elaine’s inability to forge meaningful relationships and with George being egocentric.”

It reminds us of the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer (Michael Richards) acted out the symptoms of gonorrhea so medical students could practice their diagnostic skills:

And that time the klutz was watching a surgery from the observation deck and accidentally dropped a Junior Mint into the patient’s abdominal cavity:

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Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com