Field of medicine: Primary care.

Format: Hardcover book.

Audience: Primary care physicians.

Purpose: To improve the ability of primary care physicians to diagnose and manage psychiatric problems in an office setting and to supply these practitioners with psychiatric information from specialty and subspecialty journals.

Content: The book is organized into three sections. The first 2 chapters cover psychiatric assessment and diagnosis, and the next 12 address specific mental disorders according to DSM-IV diagnostic categories. The last 4 chapters address special topics, such as difficult patients, special populations, somatic therapies, and psychotherapy.

Highlights: The book contains authoritative, state-of-the-art information on office-based psychiatry. A special feature is the use of bulleted tables that read much like lecture slides.

Limitations: The treatment of some topics is too superficial. Alternative formats may provide the primary care physician with readily usable information more effectively.

Related reading: Among other recent books on this subject are Handbook of Psychiatry for Primary Care, edited by Allwood and Gagliano (Oxford Univ Pr, 1997), and Pocket Handbook of Primary Care Psychiatry, by Kaplan and Sadock (Williams & Wilkins, 1996). The former emphasizes community issues and provides brief, perhaps too elementary presentations of information on psychiatric disorders. Kaplan and Sadock use a "sound bite" style of presentation with detailed tables in very small print. Their book contains succinct guidelines that the primary care physician can use in on-the-spot decision making. Another recently published book, MGH Guide to Psychiatry in Primary Care, edited by Stern, Herman, and Slavin (McGraw-Hill, 1998), uses a problem-based approach and takes the physician through the essential steps of differential diagnosis and treatment.

Reviewer: Albert Liebman, MD, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.