Psychiatry, Third Editionedited by Allan Tasman, Jerald Kay, Jeffrey A. Lieberman, Michael B. First, and Mario Maj. Hoboken, N.J., John Wiley & Sons, 2008, 2880 pp., $340.00.

Abstract

ajp.psychiatryonline.org This book will be especially appealing to people who liked college philosophy and want to have another go at it in a more condensed format that is a little more relevant to their work. For many clinicians, delving into the ultimate meaning of making diagnoses, prescribing treatment, and changing people may feel a bit like driving a car on a busy freeway while contemplating why the road has eight lanes, what the laws of physics are that make the car run, whether an alternative-fuel vehicle would work better, what forces led to our insistence on driving everywhere ourselves and using up so much oil, and so on. These are important questions that may have an impact on where we will drive next, but if we reason all this out while negotiating traffic, we may feel distracted and might even miss our exit. The gap between everyday practice and the ultimate meaning of what we do as clinicians was brought home to me when a very capable neurologist friend of mine told me about a patient he had just referred. “Perhaps you can explain the question she asked me,” he said. “She wanted to know what your philosophy was. ‘Is he a psychopharmacologist, a behaviorist, a Freudian, a Jungian, or a cognitive therapist? What is his orientation toward mental illness?’” “‘He’s a doctor,’ I told her. ‘He’ll prescribe whatever treatment makes the most sense.’”