Dr. Chisolm was kind enough to write a Shrink guest post for us on her inspiration for writing the book, with just a little about French cooking. Sorry no recipes here. Meg writes:
I did my psychiatry residency training at Johns Hopkins
University in the late 1980s, under department chair Paul McHugh and residency
director Phillip Slavney. These leaders
also are the authors of the textbook The
Perspectives of Psychiatry, whose principles informed the way I and a
generation of Hopkins psychiatrists since have been trained. The basic idea of The Perspectives is that by conducting an evaluation that considers
a patient’s psychiatric presentation from each of four perspectives, the
clinician can better understand the nature(s) and origin(s) of the patient’s
problems, and develop a more comprehensive and personalized formulation and
treatment. (The four perspectives
are: disease, dimensional, behavior, and life-story.)
The
most frequent question raised about the Perspectives model by trainees and clinicians
unfamiliar with the approach is “How are the Perspectives any different from
Engel’s biopsychosocial model?” In
response, McHugh and Slavney are fond of saying that the biopsychosocial model
provides the ingredients (atoms to biosphere) for understanding patients with
psychiatric illness, but the Perspectives provides the recipe. I like this analogy (or is it a
metaphor?) because, in addition to enjoying my work as a psychiatrist, I like
to cook. But, more about that
later.
As a Hopkins-trained psychiatrist, I had probably read The Perspectives of Psychiatry about
five times, beginning with my stint as a medical student during my
sub-internship at Hopkins. Let me
tell you, The Perspectives is a good,
but hard read. As a student, I
don’t think I understood much of it.
Reading it again as a psychiatry intern, having seen many more patients
with psychiatric conditions, it started to make some sense. As a junior resident, I began to
understand it a little better, which was a good thing since – by then – I was
expected to be teaching the book to medical students. By the time I was a chief resident teaching junior
psychiatry residents how to apply the Perspectives approach to patients, I
thought I had it down. Well, I was
wrong. It wasn’t until I began
writing a casebook companion to The
Perspectives of Psychiatry that I finally figured it out. So, if the biopsychosocial method
provides the ingredients and The
Perspectives of Psychiatry the recipe, that’s one highfalutin’
cookbook! And that’s where our new
book Systematic Psychiatric Evaluation: A
Step-by-Guide to Applying ‘The Perspectives of Psychiatry’ (Chisolm &
Lyketsos) comes in.
So, back to French cooking. If any of you are into cooking, reading cookbooks, or just watching
the Food Network, you may have heard of Auguste Escoffier’s 1903 Guide Culinaire. Escoffier wrote his book for
professionally trained and experienced European chefs (working in restaurants,
hotels, ocean liners, private estates, etc). Escoffier’s book outlined recipes and discussed methods of
professional food preparation and kitchen management. Escoffier did not offer his reader detailed recipes with
instruction on basic cooking techniques, as he assumed the reader would already
have this set of knowledge and skills.
His book’s target reader was not the average home cook looking for
advice on how to keep a soufflé from falling. Enter Julia Child and friends. In Mastering the Art
of French Cooking Julia Child et al translated a selection of Guide Culinaire recipes into simple
steps and added detailed instruction on the basic techniques (How do you keep a
soufflé from falling? Ask Julia). Julia Child’s goal was to start someone
off in French cooking with the hope that someday they would be ready to go
deeper and perhaps read the master himself.
And so it is with Systematic
Psychiatric Evaluation. If
you’re a clinician who already conducts a systematic psychiatric evaluation and
are adept with applying the Perspectives approach to patients, there’s no need
to read our book. But, if you are
new to the Perspectives and/or want to familiarize yourself with the model,
we’ve got you covered. Systematic Psychiatric Evaluation walks
the reader through the basic concepts of The
Perspective of Psychiatry and shows, step-by-step, how to apply these
concepts to evaluate, formulate and develop individualized treatment plans for patients
with psychiatric conditions.
Bon appétit!
