Best Psychiatry Textbook for Residency
This book helps you understand the important concepts in psychiatry, use it with other books for your preparation. Good source of review with its companion questions and answers book.
Unwieldy, unhelpful
Some people swear by this book; I don't get it. It's a pain to either read or to use as a reference The layout of this book is busier than that of an undergraduate textbook. For no apparent reason, brain images are slapped into sections of some disorders and not others. Ditto for lists of empirical studies. The authors feel it necessary to reprint as a box the DSM-IV criteria for every disorder--only the box appears in different places for different chapters. In fact, the structure of each chapter seems somewhat different, even across chapters on similar disorders. I'm not really sure about this, though, as the organizational structure of the chapters continues to elude me. And it definitely lacks some information that most people would find helpful. For instance, there are (I believe) only two decision trees in this 1400 page opus. And lots of space is wasted. It's unclear what the first 250 or so pages are doing in this book, doing a slapdash job of covering the entire lifecycle, the brain, Jean Piaget, Freud, IQ testing, and anthropology. These are bracketed by chapter 1, on interviewing, and chapter 7, on doing clinical examinations. Why those two chapters are not consecutive is anyone's guess. Do I need to go into the writing? It fluctuates between platitudes and stupefying detail. The case histories are well-written, but they are generally taken from the DSM-IV Casebook.
I only give it two stars because it does have a lot of information. I'm sure I will never open this book again, and I could really use a synopsis of psychiatry.
Synopsis of Psychiatry: Behavioral Sciences/Clinical Psychiatry
This is an excellent book. It was purchased for a social work class I was taking - Psychopathology and was used along with the DSM -IV-TR and was a great resource above and beyond the DSM. It is also very useful in my current job. It not only outlines all of the mental disorders in a easy to understand - detailed way, but it goes beyond that so that you have a real understanding of cause and effect. I would recommend this book to anyone who works with clients that need a diagnosis. It is a social work bible.
Condesed version of Big book, cutting out the fat
As known by many, Kaplan and Kaplan (or Kaplan and Sadock's) comprehensive textbook of psychiatry is pretty much the gold standard text book for the history and diagnosis of psychiatric illness used by all residencies and medical schools in the USA. This book is a thinned soft bound edition summary of the 2 volume comprehensive book. With this book, you still get many of the helpful tables, all of the information, and at half the price. This is no substitute for the Big book, but if you read this prior to any shelf exam in medical school, or as the basis for starting research into a disease in residency, you will have a good basis and diretion so your future searches will be easier, and the exams simple. Highly recommended, very good investment for Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, and OB-Gyn residents/students to have on a shelf, and essential to psychiatric residents/students.
An excellent condenced version of its big brother, in one volume
This book is a synopsis of the Comprehensive textbook of Psychiatry. It is still 1500 pages, but I strongly reccommend this as the core textbook of psychiatry for a medical student to refer to for answers, or for a non-psychiatric physician to own as a knowledgeable reference book to keep at the office. It covers everything the big book does, but it cuts out some of the longer histories and things and gets to the meat of the literature, diagnosis. It still keeps many of the helpful tables as the big book. So I strongly recommend this as your everyday one stop psych reference book.
(21 reviews)
