Mental Health, Diabetes and Endocrinology Edited by Anne M. Doherty, Aoife M. Egan and Sean Dinneen Cambridge University Press. 2021. £34.99 (pb). 166 pp. ISBN:9781911623618

The appearance of this thin paperback belies the wealth of information packed between its covers and the effort in distilling salient information gathered from around the world. There will be universal benefit for all clinicians, including psychiatrists and their teams, from the concise accounts of research on each topic, controversies, the evidence for intervention and management. Although the overview of mental disorder will be known to psychiatrists, these summaries are invaluable for secondary care clinicians and their multidisciplinary teams and primary care and community health professionals, who are likely to have the greatest contact with patients.

Importantly, the book departs from conventional endocrine topics, and addresses common challenges such as antipsychotic-induced metabolic syndrome, obesity, type 1 diabetes and eating disorders, as well as emerging topics, for example gender incongruence, and the rarer issues such as anti-androgens in forensic settings. Crucially, the role of self-management is acknowledged in a chapter devoted to this subject with an overview of the psychological models underlying behaviours detrimental to self-management, including medication compliance. This chapter should help clinicians, striving for improved control, understand better possible underlying psychodynamics in their patients, and accept that optimal management is not solely their responsibility but a partnership between patients and themselves.

While the chapter on suicidal ideation and self-harm is important, addressing the dangerous combination of diabetes, treatment with insulin and self-harm, the section on management is brief and lacks detail. ‘Maximising supervision’ will be of little help to clinicians managing patients deemed to be at high risk who retain mental capacity. Therein, lies the limitations of this book; by trying to address such broad topics such as self-harm or cognitive impairment, it succeeds less well. The chapter on mild cognitive impairment, dementia, behaviour and psychological symptoms of dementia and mental capacity is just ten pages including a short section on endocrine conditions. That said, the importance of hypoglycaemia in diabetes, the need for less stringent blood glucose control emphasised and lack of consensus on HbA_1c are acknowledged.

The final chapter discusses management, largely of diabetes, in institutional settings, the detrimental effect of healthcare silos acting as barriers to seamless mental and physical care and inequity of access. Solutions are proposed, including more integration of teams and liaison endocrinologists, at least for the in-patient setting. The authors recognise that specific measures may be required to move isolated quality improvement initiatives to the same standard of care for all. Overall, the message is clear, good communication and teamworking are key, and this book is a useful resource, both for those unfamiliar with mental health disorders and clinicians who are not endocrinologists.