Systematic Psychiatric Evaluation: A Step-by-Step Guide to Applying The Perspectives of Psychiatry

Two Johns Hopkins psychiatrists explain the Perspectives approach to evaluating patients with psychiatric disorders.

The Perspectives approach to psychiatry focuses on four aspects of psychiatric practice and research: disease, dimensional, behavior, and lifestory. In Systematic Psychiatric Evaluation, Drs. Margaret S. Chisolm and Constantine G. Lyketsos underscore the benefits of this approach, showing how it improves clinicians' abilities to evaluate, diagnose, and treat patients.

Drs. Chisolm and Lyketsos use increasingly complex case histories to help the mental health provider evaluate patients demonstrating symptoms of bipolar disorder, psychosis, suicidal ideation, depression, eating disorders, and cutting, among other conditions. The book also includes an exercise that simulates the Perspectives approach side by side with traditional methods, revealing the advantages of a method that engages not one but four points of view.

Featuring a foreword by Drs. Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney, the originators of the Perspectives approach, this innovative book will be used in psychiatric training programs as well as by practicing mental health clinicians.

Margaret S. Chisolm, MD, is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, a professor of medicine, and the vice chair for education in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The director of the Paul McHugh Program for Human Flourishing, she is the coauthor of Systematic Psychiatric Evaluation: A Step-by-Step Guide to Applying the Perspectives of Psychiatry.

Constantine G. Lyketsos, M.D., M.H.S., is the Elizabeth Plank Althouse Professor in Alzheimer's Disease Research at Johns Hopkins, where he is chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the Bayview Medical Center, vice-chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, co-director of the Division of Geriatric Psychiatry and Neuropsychiatry, and director of the Memory and Alzheimer's Treatment Center.

Paul R. McHugh, M.D., is the Henry Phipps Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, the former director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the coauthor of The Perspectives of Psychiatry, also available from Johns Hopkins. He was selected by President George W. Bush to sit on the Presidential Council on Bioethics and by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to be on their National Review Board for the elimination of the sexual abuse of children by clergy.

Phillip R. Slavney, M.D., is the Eugene Meyer III Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the author of Psychiatric Dimensions of Medical Practice, coeditor of The Primary Care Physician's Guide to Common Psychiatric and Neurologic Problems, and coauthor of The Perspectives of Psychiatry, all available from Johns Hopkins.