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The author of this useful and stimulating little book is Commissioner of Mental Hygiene for the State of Maryland. The twelve brief chapters form a very attractive introduction to the basic meaning of psychiatric ideas for the layman and the general practitioner. Dr. Preston has performed a notable service in reducing to simple and concrete terms the content of the working conceptions that have been won in mental science through long experience of trial and error in dealing with the mentally sick.
It contains a much needed pointing out of what psychiatry is not as well as an exposition of those concepts which the individual can apply with profit to his own daily problems. Erroneous notions of exaggerated achievements bordering on the miraculous are carefully punctured. It is known that often in popular thinking expectations and demands are laid to the psychiatrist which the internist or general physician have rarely if ever to deal with. To show why such thinking and expectations are wrong is one of the author's chief aims as well as one of the special services of his book.
The light informal nature of the text is an advantage throughout. Besides basic orientational matter as to what the aims, methods, and materials of psychiatry are there are useful outlines of paranoia and the variety of paranoid states; schizophrenia; the manic-depressive syndromes; hypochondriacal states; phobias; obsessions; and of the main variations of psychoneurotic and psychotic conditions in terms of the specific problems they most often present to the general view. There are also sections dealing with the phenomena of the unconscious, the complex, and related dynamic mechanisms. The account of these conceptions is not confined to abstract lines, being drawn to relate the significance which the basic conditions of mental life bear to all the gradations, on the destructive as well as on the creative side, of individual integration.
Further material deals with alcoholism and drug addiction; an