CBT for Anxiety Disorders: A Practitioner Book

negative findings. Inside psychiatry, academic psychiatrists are taken to task. The understandable desire for precision has led to diagnostic inflation into ever more categories (thank you, DSM). Low thresholds for disease intensity threaten to define millions more as ‘cases’. Although he addresses psychiatry as a whole, his outlook is inevitably framed by current issues in North American psychiatry. Many of us in the UK National Health Service seldom see anyone without a psychosis, so diagnostic inflation may seem somewhat academic. Some North American notions such as ‘hospital privileges’ need explanation. And, in the UK at least, quetiapine is not, as yet, ‘the new Valium’. I blame the editors. Who is this book for? It is too sober and scholarly for a general readership, which will expect tales of fiendish experiments and outlandish treatments. The voice is often that of a valedictory address, which may be too personal for the more academic. This book could most benefit the new entrant to psychiatry, pulled this way and that by fashion, optimism and authority. It could help to balance their necessary (and healthy) therapeutic optimism with a corrective evidence-based scepticism. And embolden the tyro to challenge the teacher, however authoritative, charming or charismatic that teacher might be.