Diagnosing and Treating Mental Illness: A Guide for Physicians, Nurses, Patients and Their Families

Designed for health care workers and others lacking extensive mental health training, this guide provides tools to help diagnose common mental health conditions in addition to guidelines for their treatment or for referrals to mental health experts. Among the information provided is advice on how to differentiate genuine mental illness from the existential problems of living, much of which may need psychotherapy but should not legitimately be diagnosed as a true mental illness. The handbook provides a concise compendium of descriptions and treatment options for a variety of psychiatric conditions–pathological anger, anxiety, and depression; obsessive-compulsive disorder; posttraumatic-stress disorder; and schizophrenia–along with a general sense of how the relationship between the psychotherapist and psychiatrist or internist is coordinated.