Joyce Bockar, psychiatrist, is a lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, and is on the staff of Stamford Hospital where she is co-director of the inpatient unit, and clinical director of the Drug Liberation Program.

Bockar recognizes correctly that an increasing number of patients in need of counseling or psychotherapy are being treated by nonmedical professionals. She feels, however, that psychriatrists, because of their medical training, are consciously and unconsciously more alert to cues that some medical or organic disease process may be responsible for a patient's complaint. The aim of her book is to teach nonmedical professionals more about differential diagnosis and patients' medical illnesses. Her hope with this “primer” is that nonmedical practitioners, given a little more “medical intelligence,” will be better able to detect those signs in patients that signal the requirement for referral to a physician. For example, a patient complaining about depression may actually be suffering from