Field of medicine: Internal medicine (including subspecialties) and psychiatry.

Format: Hardcover book.

Audience: The authors aim the book broadly to "clinical scientists ... patients, physicians, and pharmacologists." I believe that it was written for medical students, psychiatric residents, primary care residents, and subspecialty fellows and their attendings. Because of professional judgment issues, it is only secondarily useful to patients and their relatives. It is particularly helpful to anyone involved with consultation and liaison work and to those who treat patients with medical disorders necessitating pharmacologic therapy.

Purpose: To summarize the psychiatric side effects of non-psychiatric medications, including over-the-counter drugs and overt psychotropics, and their management. Herbal and folk remedies are not included. The book is intended to be an introduction and is "not meant to be the last word" about "drug ‘side effects’ ... that may be said to affect the ‘mind.’" It hopes to stimulate "interest in the cognitive and behavioral toxicities of medications," including "show[ing] where the authors may be ‘wrong’" and "... generat[ing] useful disputation" with regard to the prevalence of side effects.

Content: Each chapter lists common examples of a particular class of medication followed by description of toxic syndromes, with general comments and brief discussion of the pathophysiology involved, drug interactions, and treatment. It covers an extraordinary range of medications in a summary fashion that orients readers to the problem and refers them to definitive journal articles.

Highlights: The material comes in book and parallel CD-ROM format with a search engine requiring at least Windows 3.1 or Macintosh system 7.0. The reader may add notes, bookmarks, and cross-references to the CD-ROM version. The e-mail address of one of the authors is provided, along with the address of a World Wide Web site where updates and frequently asked questions may be found.

Limitations: The treatment sections are short and provide little detail. One of the current handbooks of internal medicine would supplement it well. Because of increasing use of over-the-counter items, such as St. John's wort and antioxidants, their inclusion would have been helpful. Some references are not up to date.

Related reading: Some books on side effects limit themselves to a particular grouping of medications, such as Ciraulo and colleagues' Drug Interactions in Psychiatry, 2nd edition (Williams & Wilkins, 1995), whereas others, such as Duke's Meyler's Side Effects of Drugs (Elsevier, 1996) include behavioral side effects but concentrate on nonbehavioral problems. This book seems to be more detailed and has more references.

Reviewer: William A. Scheftner, MD, Rush Medical College, Chicago, Illinois.