Author Description

With two new lead authors, the sixth edition of Psychiatric Diagnosis continues its thirty-five year tradition of providing a clear, critical and well-documented overview of major psychiatric syndromes, with minimum inclusion of unwieldy theories or clinical opinions. Medical students and psychiatric residents will continue to find this new edition to be a unique guide to the field-a volume that concisely yet comprehensively dissects major psychiatric disorders. Well-known for providing a thorough yet concise view of the natural history of basic psychiatric disorders, this popular text has been extensively updated, chapter by chapter, in this sixth edition. Terminology has been made consistent with DSM-IV-TR and updates made to include recent genetic and neurobiological findings. In the classification of psychiatric disorders, new data on follow-up and family/genetic studies, confirming and extending previous research, are provided. As in previous editions, each chapter systematically covers the definition, historical background, epidemiology, clinical picture, natural history, complications, family studies, differential diagnosis, and clinical management of each disorder. Some specific areas of new material include the long term course of mood disorders, genetics and neuro-imaging of schizophrenia and mood and other disorders, cognitive changes in relation to depression and dementia, brain stimulation techniques, outcome studies of eating disorders, and epidemiology of drug use disorders. In accordance with current medical community interest and research, entirely new chapters on posttraumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder have been included. Additionally, a new introduction reviews the background of medical model psychiatry and the empirical approach to psychiatric nosology. With this new edition, medical students and psychiatric residents will continue to discover that no other text provides such a lucid, well-documented and critically sound