Abstract
This is a British textbook aimed mainly at medical students studying psychiatry and allied health trainees working in the mental health area. It is succinctly written with liberal use of dot points, diagrams and tables and should make a good aid for undergraduate exam preparation. Chapters cover the main areas of psychiatry including subspecialties such as child and adolescent, geriatric, forensic and trans-cultural psychiatry. There are many texts on the market of this style and this one is more comprehensive than most.
The format is attractive and easy to read and the liberal use of high quality and well thought-out illustrations is a bonus. The headings are clear and logical. Diagnostic categories mainly follow the ICD-10 system. There are boxes summarizing key information in the text at regular intervals. By and large jargon is avoided and this book would sit well among contemporary general medical texts for undergraduates in its style.
Although some of the illustrations are well conceived and clear, they seem at times to be gratuitous, such as illustrations of people cleaning, hand-washing and checking the door in the section on obsessive-compulsive disorder. Some areas aren't handled in much depth, especially where they do not lend themselves to the diagram and tabular style of presentation. There are no separate sections dealing with treatment modalities so that in the area of psychotherapy the student will have difficulty establishing an understanding of its role in psychiatric practice, consultation-liaison psychiatry similarly is not described as an area of practice.
This book is attractively presented and gives a reasonable overview of the field and the style of presentation would make it a useful aid to exam preparation.