Two Johns Hopkins psychiatrists explain the Perspectives approach to evaluating patients with psychiatric disorders.
The Perspectives approach to psychiatry focuses on four aspects of psychiatric practice and research: disease, dimensional, behavior, and lifestory. In Systematic Psychiatric Evaluation, Drs. Margaret S. Chisolm and Constantine G. Lyketsos underscore the benefits of this approach, showing how it improves clinicians' abilities to evaluate, diagnose, and treat patients.
Drs. Chisolm and Lyketsos use increasingly complex case histories to help the mental health provider evaluate patients demonstrating symptoms of bipolar disorder, psychosis, suicidal ideation, depression, eating disorders, and cutting, among other conditions. The book also includes an exercise that simulates the Perspectives approach side by side with traditional methods, revealing the advantages of a method that engages not one but four points of view.
Featuring a foreword by Drs. Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney, the originators of the Perspectives approach, this innovative book will be used in psychiatric training programs as well as by practicing mental health clinicians.
Table of Contents:
Foreword, by Paul R. McHugh, M.D., and Phillip R. Slavney, M.D.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I: The Concepts behind the Approach
1. An Introduction
2. The Psychiatric Evaluation
3. The Life-Story Perspective
4. The Dimensional Perspective
5. The Behavior Perspective
6. The Disease Perspective
Part II: The Approach in Action
Introduction
Case 1 Bipolar Disorder: Maintaining Personhood in the Face of a Disease
Case 2 A Young Man with Psychosis: The Role of Life Story and Behavior in Disease
Case 3 A Mother's Overdose: Life Story and Dimension
Case 4 A Man with Depression amidst Multiple Life Stressors: Life Story or Disease?
Case 5 A Matriarch with Memory and Mood Problems: Managing Diagnostic Dilemmas
Case 6 An Executive with Health Worries: Dimension or Disease?
Case 7 A Young Woman's Fear of Fat: An Aberration in Feeding Behavior
Case 8 A Lawyer Who Lies and Cuts: Synthesis of a Complex Case
Case 9 A Case of Bereavement: Why Psychotherapy Matters
Summary
Appendix A: The Psychiatric Evaluation
Appendix B: The Mental Status Examination
References
Index
About the Author :
Margaret S. Chisolm, M.D., is Vice Chair for Education and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, as well as Medicine, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Board-certified in both general psychiatry and addiction medicine, Dr. Chisolm has nearly 3 decades of clinical experience in these fields. In addition, she has served as PI or co-investigator on multiple nationally funded research projects. At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Chisolm is also a member of the Miller Coulson Academy of Clinical Excellence and the Director of the Paul McHugh Program for Human Flourishing. Constantine G. Lyketsos, M.D., M.H.S., is Elizabeth Althouse Professor and director of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and vice-chairman of the department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medicine, where he is also co-director of the division of geriatric psychiatry and neuropsychiatry and director of the Memory and Alzheimer's Treatment Center.
Review :
The best go-to book I have seen for teaching thoughtful evaluation.
—Dinah Miller, MD, Clinical Psychiatry News
If you are a mental health clinician—or a consumer—and you want to understand psychiatric disorders—buy this book.
—Dr. Steven J. Ceresnie, Notes of a Psychology Watcher
A well-presented, compact summation of McHugh and Slavney's four perspectives. Faithful and concise, the descriptions are intended to formulate practical, diagram-based steps in the conceptualization of each perspective. . . . From bereavement to cognitive decline, from bipolarity to eating disorders, from personality . . . to hypochondriasis, from suicidal behavior to psychosis, the cases attempt to combine theoretical cogency with clinical clarity
—Renato D. Alarcón, M.D., M.P.H., American Journal of Psychiatry
Innovative in its orientation, this book not only should be used in psychiatric training programs but also would enrich the approach of many practising mental health professionals.
—Paul Grof, Canadian Journal of Psychiatry
It comes highly recommended as both an educational tool and an argument against the instrumentalization and reductionism prevalent in some approaches to clinical psychiatric practice.
—Kenneth Brandt Hansen, Aeta Psychiatrica Scandinavica
It would be good if the practical book by Chisolm and Lyketsos is used in education and if the residents (and their teachers) are so enthusiastic about it that they also read the book by McHugh and Slavney themselves.
—M.W. Hengeveld, Tijdschrift voor Psychiatrie
I believe that this book will be a useful companion to psychiatric residents and other mental health practitioners who struggle to better understand, diagnose, and treat patients with complex psychiatric and medical conditions.
—Radu V. Saveanu, MD, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
