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RR 2016/029 Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology: Prescriber's Guide (5th edition) Stephen M. Stahl Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2014 xvi + 802 pp. ISBN 978 1 107 67502 5 £58 $90 Online access options also available, see further at www.stahlonline.org
Keywords Boats, Dictionaries, Languages
Review DOI 10.1108/RR-07-2014-0188
Drug treatment for mental illness is an extremely contentious subject. As we pointed out when reviewing the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), (RR 2014/102) the diagnosis of such disorders is very uncertain and, to some extent, arbitrary. Mental illnesses are nearly all "spectrum disorders" - the same named disease can range in intensity from a very minor disturbance to a crippling or even life-threatening handicap. Some patients are remarkably ungrateful: a cancer patient will say "they gave me chemotherapy, which had horrible side-effects, but it got me into remission", while a psychiatric patient is more likely to say "the doctor made me take these pills which had horrible side-effects, but I finally got myself better". This cynicism is sometimes justified as some psychiatric drugs do not treat the disorder but merely mask its symptoms until it goes away on its own accord. Above all, psychiatrists are under enormous pressure to prescribe - the power of the major drug companies has to be seen to be believed. There is, therefore, a considerable potential demand for information on psychotropic drugs, both from mental health professionals and from a distrustful general public.
This demand has been catered for by a substantial range of reference resources. I recently recommended the twentieth edition of the Canadian Clinical Handbook of Psychotropic Drugs (Bezchlibnyk-Butler,...