Pocket Guide to Psychiatric Practice

The long-awaited Pocket Guide to Psychiatric
Practice is a portable and concise companion to its parent textbook,
Introductory Textbook of Psychiatry, Sixth Edition, the
preeminent introduction to psychiatry for residents, medical students, and
other health professionals. The Pocket Guide is designed to be
carried with them on clinical rotations and contains the information needed
for patient assessment and clinical management in an easily accessible and
convenient format. Mirroring the larger text, the guide takes as its premise
that physicians-regardless of their ultimate role in medicine-should be able
to define and recognize mental illnesses, to identify methods for treating
them, and, for those few who become researchers, to help develop methods for
discovering their causes and implementing preventive measures. This pocket
version, compatible with DSM-5, includes criteria sets for the most common
disorders that learners encounter and is organized to follow the
developmental lifespan.
The author, who co-edited the larger text, has
retained many of the attributes that made the parent text successful, while
adding new, user-friendly features:


* Completely up-to-date information on all of the disorders and
descriptions of newly released medications.
* A writing style that is
interesting, consistent, and highly accessible, with no redundancy.
* A
wealth of tables, lists, and other strategies for presenting information in
a concise and easy-to-understand manner.
* Content organized in
parallel with the Introductory Textbook of Psychiatry to make it
easier to locate additional learning resources-such as case vignettes,
useful clinical "pearls," self-assessment questions, and a glossary of
terms-as needed.
* An emphasis on the satisfaction of working with
psychiatric patients of all types and in all settings that will be
appreciated by learners beginning their journey in the field.


Pocket Guide to Psychiatric Practice is a highly readable,
interesting, and useful resource. Although the book is written primarily for
medical students and residents in their first years of training, it will
prove useful for individuals seeking psychiatric training from the
perspectives of other disciplines such as nursing or social work. The
Pocket Guide can be combined with the larger and more detailed
Introductory Textbook of Psychiatry and the student-oriented
Study Guide to Introductory Psychiatry, to constitute a library
of resources on psychiatric disorders and their assessment that sets the
stage for lifelong learning.