Abstract
This book seeks to provide a ‘guide to psychiatric assessment and engagement across a number of clinical problems and settings’. The book is targeted primarily at students in mental health professions and it is at that level that it is written. Certainly it is accessible, easy to read and well set out. It is presented in large page format with numerous brief key points, instructive tables and sets of recommended readings. The fact that it is multi-authored means that there is some difference in style and formatting across different chapters but this is not a major shortfall of the book as a whole.
What is more problematic is that chapters go through somewhat pedantically a similar series of issues relating to numerous different types of patients and clinical settings. Some chapters try to cover the literature on their particular patient population of interest while others hone in explicitly on the assessment. This leads to a fair amount of redundancy and overlap between chapters with a repetition of material. Thus, it is not surprising that the book comes in at something just under 400 pages.
The reader could, however, fairly readily dip into an account of a particular clinical scenario without feeling that he or she had missed out by not reading the whole book. Also, there is a fair degree of cross-referencing between chapters, which is useful.
The structure of the book is such that there are general introductory chapters about interviewing techniques, use of standardized rating scales, documentation and so forth. There is also a chapter on cultural competence in psychiatric assessment. There follows a group of chapters on assessment of particular types of patients including those with psychosis, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, eating disorders, substance-related disorders, suicidality and somatization. There is a separate chapter on forensic assessment with useful pointers to issues related to dangerousness, interviewing of sex offenders and malingering. The chapter on emergency assessment stands alone and is comprehensive in and of itself. Also the assessment of medical and surgical patients is useful for the budding consultation liaison psychiatrist. The chapter on neurological disorders avoids undue redundancy and provides useful measures for the assessment of neurological conditions that might overlap with psychiatry. This includes cognitive assessment including neuropsychological testing and a brief overview of various types of dementia as well as the place of neuroimaging in the assessment. There are also separate chapters on the assessment of patients with an intellectual disability, patients who are presenting for insurance and disability assessments, children, adolescents and older adults. These take appropriate steps towards articulating the sorts of problems that are encountered in psychiatric interviews with these patients and/or in these settings and provide useful tips and guides for the reader. There is also a chapter on family assessment and some perspectives on patients and families.
Overall, this book is of potential use to the psychiatric trainee, and is nicely presented if somewhat repetitious and pedantic.
David Castle
Melbourne, Australia
© 2007 David Castle