Abstract
The authors present a thorough review covering issues of management across a broad range of psychiatric disorders in pregnancy; depression and psychosis the most comprehensively covered. This is an important area, and one that while some psychiatrists specialize in, many more will need to deal with either through the normal course of referral, or when their own patient wishes to, or becomes pregnant.
There is a strong leaning towards the issues associated with psychotropic medication use in pregnancy, which is an area of clear concern in the medico-legal orientated milieu of the USA, and certainly is the basis of many referrals and phone calls to me for opinion. This is covered comprehensively, and gives guidance of when medication is justified, but stops short of giving a ‘prescription’ for this. It provides a very useful guide and this is the clear strength of the book.
The book also contains a chapter on ‘Obstetrics for the nonobstetrician’ which covers a number of important and often neglected areas, from differentiating between pregnancy and psychiatry symptoms to issues of genetic counselling and teenage pregnancies. Because of the breadth of cover, however, there is limited depth. This limits the usefulness to someone well entrenched in the area, but of value to those with an interest but limited experience.
The psychological aspects of pregnancy and management are also covered, though not as comprehensively, and there is a disappointing lack of reference to the motherfoetus and by inference mother-infant relationship. This perhaps deserves another book on its own, so with the exception of this oversight, this work offers a valuable resource for general practitioners and psychiatrists. The style is somewhat dry, so it is probably a book to delve in and out of rather than reading from cover to cover.