Approach to the Psychiatric Patient: Case-Based Essays. Edited by John W. Barnhill. Washington, DC/London:  American Psychiatric Publishing, 2009.  523 pp.

This psychiatric book is remarkable in its format. Its editor, John Barnhill, is chief of consultation-liaison psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center and is on the faculty of Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

Discussions are focused around ten clinical cases selected to reflect central, commonly occurring categories of patient problems that psychiatrists are called upon to evaluate, explicate, and recommend forms of treatment for. Six of these case examples are chosen to illustrate problems of approach and triage that psychiatrists face in hospital settings, from emergency rooms to various medical and surgical wards. The four remaining examples illustrate problems of evaluation and approach in outpatient psychiatric settings. All the cases are constructed to illustrate and deal with central, common human problems, such as depression (including geriatric depression), mood instability, chronic psychosis, terminal illness, agitation, bereavement, anxiety, hypomania, and failure with attendant shame.

This text/reference book is unusual in that each of these case examples is followed by ten to twelve brief essays of one to three pages each. Every essay represents a distinctly separate aspect of an approach to the patient described, written by a different expert. These experts, numbering more than 100, are often internationally esteemed. And, notably,