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The Textbook of Biological Psychiatry is aimed at a number of related disciplines who occupy their professional work at what Jaak Panksepp calls “the middle level of analysis where mental faculties can be related credibly to objective brain systems in ways which may be clinically productive” (p. 27). The book gives clinicians the information needed to perform state-of-the-art treatment, and at the same time it presents a conceptual framework with which to evaluate research that will be coming through our journals over the next period. Dr. Panksepp's diplomatic and yet innovative stance pervades a work that represents many schools of thought and perspectives on both psychiatric disorders and clinical treatments.
The textbook is divided into three sections, “Foundational Concepts,” “Core Psychiatric Challenges,” and “Future Prospects.” In the first section, the reader is oriented in the most sophisticated way to basic ways of thinking about psychiatry, in which Dr. Panksepp gives his history of the field in the twentieth century. In the second chapter, he begins a discussion, cowritten with Mario Liotto, of radiological brain imaging and affective neuroscience. State and channel functions are a key idea here—that is, discrete informational/cognitive thinking can flow through distinct brain circuits—categorized and discussed by imaging changes in brain blood flow during an fMRI study. In contrast, moods are generated in a brainstem/limbic fashion. Drs. Panksepp and Liotto have an elegant illustration that shows the initiation and maintenance of an emotional state by switching off cortical regions, resulting in brainstem/limbic dominance—a structural/functional diagram of how we “lose it.” As I know from repeated experience, at times of intense emotional upheaval I cannot think straight. Dr. Panksepp presents cogent explanatory neuroscience concepts that underlie this very common human experience.
Dr. Panksepp has suggested a number of concepts that are major potential in