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It has always seemed important to me that a book review must be assessed with the credentials or characteristics of the reviewer in mind. To that end, I would identify myself as a seasoned (4 decades in private practice) psychiatric and psychoanalytic practitioner who treats all comers; participates rarely and selectively in split-treatment arrangements; prescribes mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, antidepressants, and anxiolytics when indicated; and has generally tried to keep up with the psychiatric and psychopharmacology literature, as well as changing diagnostic systems and criteria that have emerged over the last half century. I am a conservative prescriber, reluctantly engage in polypharmacy, and am quick to consult my more adventurous colleagues when a patient responds sluggishly or not at all to my treatments.
I think that this book is sensational and can wholeheartedly recommend it to any mental health practitioner interested in bipolar disorders, whether or not my profile resonates with theirs.
Research efforts over the past decades have clarified distinctions between bipolar I and II and led to the concept of bipolar “spectrum” disorders. For readers who seek a clear description of this evolution in thinking and the relationship to DSM-5 and other diagnostic systems, this volume will be thoroughly satisfying. So lucid is Dr. Phelps's consideration of the spectrum concept that one may wonder how dichotomous classifications ever persisted as long as they have. So compelling is such an approach that Phelps highlights the applicability to trauma and borderline disorders—“… borderlinity also makes sense as a continuum than as a yes/no phenomenon” (p. 43).
Diagnostic challenges abound in psychiatry—bipolar I versus II; bipolar depression versus unipolar depression; bipolar disorder versus borderline personality disorder—to list just a few. This book deals effectively with all of these and more, including some I had not myself previously considered: Does a patient