Points of View: Stories of Psychopathology

From our regular book review column.

In the increasingly competitive market of basic review books in psychiatry, a new arrival has to have some particular feature to distinguish it and place it on the reader’s shelf. Two features distinguish Points of View: good writing and an appealing format. The format used by the author is fairly original. Each
chapter consists of a brief introduction describing a major psychiatric disorder, which is a simplified listing of the diagnostic criteria from DSM-IV, followed by stories (printed in a gray block) illustrating that particular condition. Most of these stories are in 2 parts: one part presenting an outsider’s view of the behavior of the individual and the other part that person’s subjective experience.