Shorter Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry

This purchase can best be described as 'great', as a clinical resource it has everything I need, a great purchase. I highly recommend it to anyone in psychiatry.

Excelent book!

Not informative as I expected. But would be useful for post graduate trainees in there first two to three years. Too expensive for the amount of knowledge it contains. especially for a kindle edition.

Shorter Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry is a wonderful psychiatric textbook. It is well organized and covers everything from Autism to Tourette's Disorder in great detail. It covers the new atypical antipsychotic medications. I give it 5 stars. By Gregg L. Friedman MD, Psychiatrist, Hallandale Beach, FL

This book is hands down the worst "textbook" I have ever read since I gained any sort of cognitive ability in reading. After reading a few chapters I'm not quite sure if I'm reading a textbook or just a book with text. Written in language that is as pretentious as its title, the "Shorter" Oxfuurd Textbook of Psychiatry probably caters better to 1) certain Northeastern Atlantic Islanders who are more used to reading Charles Dickens than a proper medical textbook, or 2) certain professionals whose job schedules can afford them the luxury of time to read such a text with tea and scones. Sentences are long-winded, and littered by frequent and simply annoying citations of studies(Shakespeare, 1601) that are often done (Dickens, 1861) some 30 years ago (Some Medical Student, 2013). You can almost feel the authors were making desperate attempts to stylize every paragraphs in such a way that concepts are rarely delivered to readers in active sentences. This style of writing is extremely pompous and user-unfriendly for someone who actually tries to LEARN rather than to DECIPHER. Macroscopically, the organization of content within chapters is equally egregious. For example in the chapter of alcohol abuse, it begins with the DSM/ICD classification of substance abuse disorder (alright, nothing to complain here), then move on to a tedious discussion of the political correctness of using the term "alcoholism" (err..ok), then onto moral and ethical models (what!?), then some random epidemiological data, history of alcohol abuse studies.......After 3 or 4 pages the authors finally remember to discuss alcohol disorder itself, as if they just suffered from some sort of folie a deux from seeing too many patients with circumstantial thinking. But even then the authors are merely quoting a bunch of figures from selected studies, with the usual abundance of MLA style citations along the way. It's like reading an anthology of abstracts from pubmed, rather than a textbook with a general discussion of psychiatric disorders. For someone who is just starting out on psychiatry, either as a student or as a junior resident, this book is definitely NOT the book you would go to. It simply does not have any concrete discussion/description of psychiatric disorders as you would expect from a traditional textbook. Rather, you will be reading a regurgitation of data from various studies, peppered with some irrelevant discussion on history, ethics, and whatever medical services are available in the UK (...fine if you're from the UK ). I would give this book negative 5 stars if I can, but I'll give it one for the tables that compare DSM vs ICD...and for being an expensive doorstop.

Met my expectations and arrived early!

Claro, sintético, actualizado y con una visión muy integral. Imprescindible para estudiantes de medicina, residentes de psiquiatría y también psiquiatras

I have bought this book to study Psychiatry as a fourth year medical student. I chose this one after having a glance over a lot of other Psychiatry books, and I liked this one because it looked like the most balanced of all. It seemed to cover all the important information a student has to know and at the same time keeping the book non-overwhelming for the student. In fact, it did. Maybe this book will not give you the broadest knowledge about Psychiatry, but it will cover the important points without being too extensive. You can even make it less extensive by skipping the Etiology parts. These parts seem to follow the basic rule that, the less we know about something, the more we have to say about it. Most of these parts can be safely skipped without losing important information, but it is better to keep in mind that it may still contain something important. Other thing that left me quite amazed was the first chapter. I had always thought that Psychiatry and Psychopathology textbooks were always separate volumes. But Oxford's Shorter Textbook of Psychiatry includes a brief chapter on Psychopathology which, while not being as extensive as a true Psychopathology textbook, is great at explaining the main manifestations of psychiatric disorders! By now, its greatest fault is only not being accordingly to DSM-5. That made things a little harder while studying, but nothing serious. It is true a lot of things have changed, but most are minor changes, and you can always find online the major changes to DSM-IV-TR. Well, a new edition is likely on its way, so this fault will soon be corrected - and I myself will want a copy of that edition! This textbook exceeded all my expectations. I only give it five stars because I cannot give any more. If I could go back in time, would I buy it again? Absolutely, no question about it!

Really Nice book for clinical psychologists

Before I bought this book I was skeptical of psychiatry. The authors explore the subject in a detailed yet clear manner. They acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of the discipline, and cover everything this medical student needs to know.