Medical Psychiatry Theory And Practice

This guide to modern psychiatry explores approaches to diagnosing and treating psychiatric disorders. It illustrates each approach's strengths and weaknesses and then suggests how to interweave them in working with patients. Using clinical vignettes, it illustrates the connections between clinical phenomenology, pathophysiology, and treatment.

The goal of this book is to provide a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between the ';psychological'; areas of medicine and the more somatic aspects of health care in our current social environment.

The book covers all the core aspects of child and adolescent mental health, starting with the background to emotional and behavioural problems and looking at models and tools for assessment and treatment before examining specific problems encountered in children, young people, and their families from different cultural backgrounds.Key featuresclear

The Health Psychology Reader is designed to complement and support the recent textbook Health Psychology: Theory, Research and Practice by David F. Marks, Michael Murray, Brian Evans and Carla Willig (SAGE, 2000). It can also be used as a stand-alone resource given its didactic nature. The Reader explores key topics within the health psychology field with incisive introductions to each section by the Editor and includes a selection of the most important theoretical and empirical published work.

Many published books that comment on the medical model have been written by doctors, who assume that readers have the same knowledge of medicine, or by those who have attempted to discredit and attack the medical practice. Both types of book have tended to present diagnostic categories in medicine as universally scientifically valid examples of clear-cut diseases easily distinguished from each other and from health; with a fixed prognosis; and with a well-understood aetiology leading to disease-reversing treatments. These are contrasted with psychiatric diagnoses and treatments, which are described as unclear and inadequate in comparison. The Medical Model in Mental Health: An Explanation and Evaluation explores the overlap between the usefulness of diagnostic constructs (which enable prognosis and treatment decisions) and the therapeutic effectiveness of psychiatry compared with general medicine. The book explains the medical model and how it applies in mental health, assuming little knowledge or experience of medicine, and defends psychiatry as a medical practice.