Intelligent Drug Prescribing in Psychiatry

Peter Tyrer is the Professor of Community Psychiatry in the Centre for Mental Health in the Division of Experimental Medicine, Imperial College, London, UK. His main interests are in models of delivering community psychiatric services, the classification and treatment of common mental illnesses, particularly anxiety and health anxiety, and the classification and management of personality disorders. He also leads on research into the management of patients with intellectual disability and on new psychological treatments for a common but largely unrecognised condition, health anxiety. He is experienced in the management of those with severe mental illness, substance misuse and personality disorder and has developed a new treatment, nidotherapy, to help these people by making environmental, not personal, changes. Much of his recent work has been concerned with improving and extending the concept of personality disorder. Personality disturbance is very common, not just in psychiatric practice, and this importance has been largely unrecognised as the classification system for this group of disorders is so poor. Fortunately, a major reform of classification is under way and will both simplify, and, we hope, destigmatise a very common form of mental distress.

‘A timely and balanced educational text from a highly experienced psychiatrist with a long and exemplary research and clinical career into the medical treatment of mental illness. [The book] will help practitioners, patients and the media gain a balanced understanding of the role of medicines in this field rather than having to navigate some of the more extreme claims of ineffectiveness or harms that have been popularised in recent years. I fully support the emphasis that permeates the book on a mature and informed patient−doctor relationship to optimise treatment outcomes and encourage all trainee psychiatrists and GPs to learn from it.’David Nutt, Edmond J. Safra Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology, Imperial College London, UK

• Chapter 1. Models of drug action in psychiatry, Chapter 2. What should patients know about psychotropic drugs?, Chapter 3. What happens when drugs enter the body, Chapter 4. Essential elements to understand in prescribing, Chapter 5. Diagnosis and drug indications, Chapter 6. Personality and drug treatment, Chapter 7. The special problem of benzodiazepines, Chapter 8. The confusing world of withdrawal, Chapter 9. Drug prescription in young and older people, Chapter 10. Understanding the placebo response, Chapter 11. Deprescribing, Chapter 12. Prescribing policies, Chapter 13. Full list of psychotropic drugs and their indications,,