Overview

The Essential Psychopharmacology franchise began 17 years ago as a published offshoot of my lectures for mental health professionals.

I have always had to 'see' something before I could understand it, especially disease mechanisms and drug actions, and thus developed a compendium of figures and diagrams for my lectures. With my long term illustrator Nancy Muntner, we gradually developed a ‘visual language’ for psychopharmacology with icons and figures that have become the signature feature of Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology.

The original textbook – Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology – explained how drugs work but not how to use them, so the Prescriber’s Guide was created as a companion to the textbook. For this, in addition to our characteristic use of unique icons, we also included standard evidence based drug information. I also added ‘tips and pearls’ based on the art of psychopharmacology and derived as much from my experience in clinical practice as from the evidence.

More recently, we added the third leg of the stool. The Case Studies book is about living through the treatments that work, the treatments that fail, and the mistakes made along the journey. This is psychiatry in real life, these are the patients from your waiting room. The intention of the book is that it will reassure, inform, and guide better clinical decision making.

Also available are the books in the Stahl's Illustrated Series, which evolved to answer the need for a distillation of focused therapeutic areas in a highly visual and easy to digest format in the size of a pocketbook.

And now, I am pleased to announce that all of these resources are also available via your computer at Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology Online.