Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders by Glen O. Gabbard
The rapidly evolving knowledge base in psychiatry mandates timely updates to the consensus on treating various psychiatric disorders. Fulfilling that mandate is this third edition of the Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders. With a deliberately pluralistic approach, its 90 chapters include new authors and new studies on each disorder plus updated accounts of optimal treatments for both children and adults. Although it emphasizes the results of randomized controlled trials when available, the text also includes data from uncontrolled studies and accumulated clinical wisdom when there is little empirical research from which to draw. Further, this definitive compendium combines these data with highly sophisticated integrative models of treatment to help clinicians select among the available modalities to create rational conceptual frameworks that maximize the effectiveness of the overall treatment plan. At the same time as it presents complex material in a reader-friendly format, this collection of expert opinions - including discussions of sometimes controversial treatments - retains its central theme that the art and science of clinical psychiatry is found in adjusting the treatment to the needs of a particular patient.