Stahl Online is a one-stop shop, covering everything a mental health professional or teacher will ever need to know about neuropsychopharmacology. Comprehensive and regularly updated, Stahl Online provides full access to the entire current portfolio of books by Dr Stephen M. Stahl.
Stahl Online is a one-stop shop, covering everything a mental health professional or teacher will ever need to know about neuropsychopharmacology. Comprehensive and regularly updated, Stahl Online provides full access to the entire current portfolio of books by Dr Stephen M. Stahl.
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Deciding when psychiatric medications or other types of treatments are indicated – and defining precise targets and goals of treatment – is perhaps the most fundamental of all undertakings in clinical psychiatry. As with all medical treatments, clinicians and patients should both have a clear and explicit understanding of what they expect medications, psychotherapy, or other interventions, to do. Medicines do not fix bad relationships or resolve existential dilemmas, but they can equip people with more intact capabilities to solve problems through better concentration and executive functioning, or improve someone’s capacity to negotiate stresses with less bias and influence from distorted beliefs or intense emotions. Pharmacotherapy is somewhat analogous to eyeglasses when it comes to driving a car; glasses do not confer driving skills but they can help minimize visual obstructions and improve how the brain processes information in ways that might otherwise prevent someone from making the fullest use of their knowledge about the rules of the road. Psychotherapy constitutes driving lessons.
Edited by
Nevena V. Radonjić, State University of New York Upstate Medical University,Thomas L. Schwartz, State University of New York Upstate Medical University,Stephen M. Stahl, University of California, San Diego
In preceding chapters, we have focused mainly on how to think through clinical problems that are often ambiguous or have multiple viable solutions, each with their respective pros and cons. We have deliberately refrained from offering specific recommendations about “what to do” in a given situation when no single best answer may exist. When that happens, the clinician’s task involves framing testable hypotheses and applying a reasoning process to arrive at a sensible individualized treatment regimen (ITR) for a given patient based on their unique clinical profile. Our goal has been to steer readers away from one-size-fit-all protocol-driven care and replace that approach with a more decision-analytic patient-specific iterative strategy, where nodes along a decision tree are determined by the personalized characteristics of a given individual.
Edited by
Nevena V. Radonjić, State University of New York Upstate Medical University,Thomas L. Schwartz, State University of New York Upstate Medical University,Stephen M. Stahl, University of California, San Diego
