Thoroughly updated for its Fifth Edition, Kaplan and Sadock's Pocket Handbook of Clinical Psychiatry remains a staple for medical students on psychiatric rotations, psychiatric residents, practitioners, and mental health professionals. In an easy-to-scan outline format, this popular quick-reference handbook summarizes the etiology, epidemiology, clinical characteristics, diagnosis, and treatment of all psychiatric disorders in adults and children. Psychopharmacologic principles and prescribing methods are briefly described.
The book is replete with DSM-IV-TR and other tables and includes boxed, highlighted Clinical Hints. Each chapter ends with specific page and chapter references to Kaplan and Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Ninth Edition .
As someone fascinated by mental illness, it really pains me to say that this book is outrageous. My first thorough experience with clinical psychology (a field I deeply love and therefore intend to devote my research interest to in the future), it left me confused and often exasperated. Though intended for psychiatrists instead of psychology majors (which could partly explain my confusion), all in all, it lacks in structure and organization, while (it being psychoanalytically orientated) it often provides FALSE information about other therapeutic approaches, often confusing behaviorism with CBT. To be frank, I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. Now that the new DSM is released the authors should take this opportunity and reconsider the structure, as well as the language of the book –let alone its accuracy- in order to have a more reader-friendly result.
Can you believe I passed this class? Yeah... me neither. This book is badly written (and that comes from someone that loves tables and structure) and too subjective for my taste when I read science (which surprised me too, since one would think this is 100% facts- it isn't).
it's a great synthesis, for rapid consultation, and has a lots of plusses in the matter of treatment and essential high lights to make the right diagnosis