Using DSM-IV: A Clinician's Guide to Psychiatric Diagnosis Book

DSM-IV is here, and mental health professionals?whether they applaud its rigor or decry its rigidity?will have to know how to use it. Like its predecessor, DSM-III, DSM-IV is empirically based and a theoretical. The psychodynamics of mental disorders and their etiologies are not considered. Its principal advantage is that it provides a reliable system of diagnosis. Its principal flaw is that it can lead the clinician to focus too exclusively on categorizing symptom clusters rather then on empathically understanding the person who is suffering the symptoms. In Using DSM-IV: A Clinician's Guide to Psychiatric Diagnosis, Dr. Anthony LaBruzza and Jose Mendez-Villarrubia offer the needed supplement to the DSM-IV. Their book, a veritable road map for DSM-IV, explains the technical language and hierarchical classifications of DSM-IV while it demonstrates how the system can be adapted to a clinical approach. In cogent prose replete with examples, the authors show how to use DSM-IV to arrive at accurate diagnoses that include rather than forsake dynamic conceptualizations of clients' psychological functioning. The authors review each DSM-IV diagnostic category, helping the reader to see what clients with a specific pathology look like, what is actually needed to qualify for the disorder, and what similar disorders to rule out. Because theirs is a fundamentally humane and clinical approach to mental illness, LaBruzza and Mendez-Villarrubia suggest that any interview, even a mental status exam, should be a helpful experience for the client. They show how to embed a diagnostic interview in the on going clinical assessment and to relate to and understand each client as unique, even while finding the right diagnostic category for him or her. This attunement to individuals also enables LaBruzza and Mendez-Villarrubia to consider issues of cultural diversity. Both authors have extensive experience working with large Hispanic populations and have included an in-depth chapter on assessing Hispanic clients and, in particular, on assessing the prototypic folk illness category ataque de nervios. In this new era of managed health care and increasing scrutiny of clinicians' work, the demand for uniform, accurate diagnoses has never been higher. Facility with the DSM-IV system is imperative. But so too is a thoughtful understanding of clients. Using DSM-IV: A Clinician's Guide is the one resource that can help clinicians combine descriptive and dynamic orientations to clients to produce competent diagnoses and useful pictures of psychodynamics. As an explanatory and inclusive manual of DSM-IV, it is the essential book.Read More