Two Johns Hopkins psychiatrists explain the Perspectives approach to evaluating patients with psychiatric disorders.

The Perspectives approach to psychiatry focuses on four aspects of psychiatric practice and research: disease, dimensional, behavior, and lifestory. In Systematic Psychiatric Evaluation, Drs. Margaret S. Chisolm and Constantine G. Lyketsos underscore the benefits of this approach, showing how it improves clinicians' abilities to evaluate, diagnose, and treat patients.

Drs. Chisolm and Lyketsos use increasingly complex case histories to help the mental health provider evaluate patients demonstrating symptoms of bipolar disorder, psychosis, suicidal ideation, depression, eating disorders, and cutting, among other conditions. The book also includes an exercise that simulates the Perspectives approach side by side with traditional methods, revealing the advantages of a method that engages not one but four points of view.

Featuring a foreword by Drs. Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney, the originators of the Perspectives approach, this innovative book will be used in psychiatric training programs as well as by practicing mental health clinicians.

Margaret S. Chisolm, M.D., is Vice Chair for Education and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, as well as Medicine, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Board-certified in both general psychiatry and addiction medicine, Dr. Chisolm has nearly 3 decades of clinical experience in these fields. In addition, she has served as PI or co-investigator on multiple nationally funded research projects. At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Chisolm is also a member of the Miller Coulson Academy of Clinical Excellence and the Director of the Paul McHugh Program for Human Flourishing. Constantine G. Lyketsos, M.D., M.H.S., is Elizabeth Althouse Professor and director of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and vice-chairman of the department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medicine, where he is also co-director of the division of geriatric psychiatry and neuropsychiatry and director of the Memory and Alzheimer's Treatment Center.