LAUSR

C linical Psychopharmacology: Principles and Practice (Oxford University Press) is a 2019 textbook written entirely by S. Nassir Ghaemi, MD, MPH, Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology at the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, and an investigator at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Ghaemi is a highly experienced investigator in clinical psychopharmacology and the treatment of major mood disorders, with years of experience in clinical psychiatry and the education of medical students and trainees in psychiatry. He is a prolific author, with several hundred peer-reviewed scientific reports and 8 books as author or editor, and was a founding editor of a monthly newsletter on psychopharmacology. Clinical Psychopharmacology is unusual as a single-author work in an increasingly technically and clinically complex field. Most currently available textbooks on the topic are multiauthored and often represent multiple perspectives. This 580-page volume includes a preface, 49 chapters, and 4 appendices that address diagnostic problems in contemporary psychiatry. The chapters are organized into 6 sections: Basic Psychopharmacology, Clinical Research Concepts, Drug Classes,Diseases and Syndromes, Special Topics (including treatment of groups based on age, sex, and race, and comments on drug discovery and development), as well as a section on The Art of Psychopharmacology. For a textbook of clinical psychopharmacology, the extensive material presented is not easy to access and digest. Most information is presented discursively and in separate, sometimes overlapping sections. Lacking are summarizing tabulations of drug types, generic and brand names, doses, basic pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties, and adverse effects, which are typical of most textbooks of this type. These characteristics make it difficult to “look up” basic information about the properties and uses of specific medicines, although an extensive index helps. Another critical observation is that the book is not adequately edited to address spelling and grammatical errors and mixing of generic and brand names of drugs. This shortcoming is surprising in a product from a highly regarded