Clinical Psychiatry: Issues and Challenges

Abstract

In the preface the author states that the book is based on lectures he gave to medical students and residents in psychiatry. This book, therefore, as suggested by the title, is not a comprehensive textbook as such. Nineteen chapters cover a wide range of psychiatric disorders. The first ten chapters are devoted to organic brain disease and correlate brain physiology with the psychopathology of such conditions as delirium, organic dementia, and the epilepsies. In his elegant discussions of these conditions the author frequently applies Hughlings Jackson's theory, that in any disease of the nervous system the highest, evolutionary younger and therefore more vulnerable, levels of functioning will be affected first, thereby leading to a restitution at the next lower and evolutionary older level. The last chapters discuss different aspects of neurosis, schizophrenia, and depression. Here the author includes the thoughtful and erudite views of Kraepelin, Freud, Bleuler, and others but