The Psychiatric Interview: A Practical Guide

by Daniel J. Carlat

The psychiatric interview is your window into the mind of your patient. With this practical, how-to handbook, you'll examine each aspect of the psychiatric interview in detail. Your journey begins with the general principles essential to effective interviewing—including techniques for approaching threatening topics, improving patient recall, and dealing with challenging patients. The sections that follow show you how to obtain the psychiatric history, interview for diagnosis, and interview for treatment. The Practical Guides in Psychiatry series provides quick, concise information for professionals on the front lines of mental health care. Written in an easy-to-read, conversational style, these invaluable resources take you through each step of the psychiatric care process, delivering fast facts and helpful strategies that help you provide effective and compassionate care to your patients. Make The Psychiatric Interview your bridge to understanding . NEW to the Second Edition... When you're at the forefront of mental health care, let this practical handbook show you how to make the most of the psychiatric interview. Order your copy today.

Genres: Psychology, Psychiatry, Medicine, Mental Health, Nonfiction

316 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1999

Reviews

[Bianca Iglesias]

Great tool

Great tool for practice for anyone in the psychiatric field. Highly recommend as it is brief and easy to follow.

[Boris Tizenberg]

This is a pretty quick read, that is thorough, while remaining very accessible. In addition to overviews about the different parts of the interviews, it includes examples and pearls. Highly recommend to any mental health professional.

[Meaghan]

I admit I'm not a psychiatrist or clinician of any kind; I'm just interested in the field. I think if I were one, however, this book would be very helpful, especially if I were just starting out. It's clear and concise, and I liked the examples given and the "clinicial vignettes." I would recommend this to any beginning psychiatrist or med student in psych rotation.

[Danny]

useful primer for med students and beginner mental health clinicians to learn psychiatric interviewing. describes the skills and strategies necessary to conduct a thorough assessment, going beyond the basic symptom review typical of history taking in other disciplines. does a good job of exposing the mistakes and weaknesses of untrained interviewing (such as the tendency to attribute symptoms to a particular disorder, rather than realizing the symptom is present in a wide variety of diagnoses). has a few good mnemonics, while others are tedious. a quick and practical read.

[Bablu]

helped me figure out how a psydoc functions while interviewing. heavy on common sense, for good and bad. the meat of the book starts in section two with the mnemonics. not to say section one is skippable (it's easy to get through) but the most worthwhile are the sections on diagnosis and therapy. pretty sure having categorization and stereotypes of psychiatric illness memorized from an intro book isn't great for future conviviality

[Robert]

Good, concise, interview guide. However, a lot of data is from old sources.

[Sarah]

I mean, what can I say? It is assigned reading for school but it is a helpful textbook, and I did finish reading it this month!

[Chavonne]

Diagnosis is, to me, one of the most difficult parts of being a therapist. On principle, I'm against diagnosing clients; however, as we are a managed-care driven society, I must. This book is incredibly helpful in giving key questions to ask to differentiate between similar disorders (I struggle with depressive disorder NOS and dysthymia). Also, the mnemonics are great. Some are incredibly useful, such as DIGFAST for bipolar disorder and SIEGCAPS for major depressive disorder. Some, however, are just silly; the one for panic disorder had me laughing out loud. This book is a real treasure that I will use time and again.

[Anthony Koller]

Well worth it!

A solid, reliable, although neither perfect nor exhaustive, tour through the psychiatric interview. Well worth the read for registrars/residents in psychiatry.

[Heshan Gunawardena]

If you had to read just one book about interviewing psychiatric patients..,this is that book.