Amazon.com description: Product Description: Approach to the Psychiatric Patient: Case Based Essays consists of more than 100 essays that address one of 10 carefully selected psychiatric cases. The essays reflect the breadth of modern psychiatry, the cases span the diagnostic spectrum, and the situations range from emergency rooms and inpatient services to outpatient psychotherapy offices.

Some of the country s most eminent psychiatrists and psychologists including basic scientists, social scientists, clinicians, clinical researchers, psychopharmacologists, and psychoanalysts have contributed essays. Each author was asked to discuss a specific aspect of a case, as if providing a curbside consult to a colleague or student. In addition to presenting a perspective on our knowledge base, each author highlights pertinent dilemmas, ambiguities, and limitations. In so doing, the authors help create a richly complex mosaic that reflects a sophisticated biopsychosocial approach to patients.

All of the authors are affiliated with one or more of the following institutions: Weill Cornell Medical College, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Rockefeller University.

Approach to the Psychiatric Patient is a thought-provoking accompaniment to standard psychiatric textbooks. Not only does it provide interesting perspectives on psychiatric knowledge, theory, and practice, it encourages an approach that combines curiosity, skepticism, and compassion.