Psychology in General Practice

This compact volume, eleventh in the Practitioner Handbook series, performs just what it promises. In seventeen brief chapters contributed by specialists, the mental aspects of disease are presented simply and sympathetically to the general practitioner. He is encouraged by the common sense statements to be alert to, sympathetic with and interested in the psychologic factors which contribute to nearly all symptom pictures and are of prime importance in a large fraction of the cases reaching his office. As Culpin says, an eminent psychiatrist wrote that he saw more psychologic cases in general practice than he did later when specializing in the subject. Further, the practitioner is urged to try his hand at simple psychotherapy and to seek expert help freely and is given the needed criteria on which to make his judgments.

General statements on classification of mental disease, case taking, differential diagnosis and therapy are followed by sections on