Current Diagnosis and Treatment in Psychiatry

Letter to the Editor

With the availability of a plethora of textbooks and journals and the seemingly unlimited information available on the Internet, it is fair to ask if we need another general textbook in psychiatry. The answer of course depends on the quality and focus of the volume. Current Diagnosis and Treatment in Psychiatry, the newest volume in the well-established Lange series, follows a model established by Lange Medical Books to write a text that not only covers a discipline in an encyclopedic fashion, but also presents the core knowledge of a discipline in a fashion that the student of the discipline, as well as the more experienced practitioner, can then apply to his or her clinical work. This link of critical knowledge to practice is not always clearly expressed in textbooks, and neither journals nor the Internet usually accomplishes this essential task.