Description: Mental health professionals routinely make treatment decisions without necessarily having an overarching perspective about optimal next steps. This important new book provides them with reader-friendly, pragmatic strategies to approach clinical problems as testable hypotheses. It discusses how to apply concepts based on decision analytic theory using risk-benefit analyses, contingency planning, measurement-based care, shared decision making, pharmacogenetics, disease staging, and machine learning. Readers will learn how these tools can help them craft optimal pharmacological and psychosocial interventions tailored to the needs of an individual patient. The book covers topics such as diagnostic ambiguity, interview technique, applying statistical concepts to individual patients, artificial intelligence, and managing high-risk, treatment-resistant, or demanding and difficult patients. Valuable clinical vignettes are featured throughout the book to illustrate common dilemmas and scenarios where the relative merits of competing treatment options invite a more iterative than definitive approach. For all healthcare professionals who prescribe psychotropic medications.
Brief description: Joseph Goldberg is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
Review Quotes: 'Psychiatry, at best, is both a science and an art. Lacking formal tools like x rays and pathology tests in the main, generating a valid diagnosis and then determining the optimal treatment requires both domains to be brought into play by the psychiatrist. Some learn criteria lists and weight guidelines documents, a process that risks a 'painting by numbers' approach. Some 'hear the music' and meld (or iterate) left brain and right brain thinking to operate to a pattern analytic approach. Malcolm Gladwell has argued that any skill requires ten thousand hours to obtain expertise. This book by two skilled clinicians and educators can be guaranteed to reduce that period, being jam packed with clinical wisdom. Their focus on a non-patriarchal shared decision-making model is illuminating. Will Rogers once astutely observed that 'Common sense ain't that common.' This book is redolent with common sense and at level rarely observed in medicine let alone psychiatry.' Gordon Parker, Scientia Professor of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales, Sydney