Vladan Starcevic's book reminds me of an age that I thought had passed. Nothing to do with John Major's vision of ‘old maids cycling to evensong’, or even of Tony Blair's nostalgia for ‘respect’, but of a time when general adult psychiatrists were permitted to treat patients with anxiety disorders and weren't made to feel embarrassed for doing so.
I believe that it is right that a book about anxiety is aimed at a psychiatric readership. The managerialist discourse of schizophrenia as ‘severe enduring mental illness’ leads to the view that other illnesses are ‘minor’ and therefore may be treated by less skilful (and less well paid) practitioners. Although there is much evidence to support the use of clinical guidelines in anxiety, to whom do patients with severe agoraphobia or obsessive-compulsive disorder turn when eight sessions of cognitive-behavioural therapy and six weeks of taking a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor have failed them? If my straw poll of trainees’ knowledge of therapeutic dosages of tricyclic antidepressants or of noncognitive psychological formulations is representative, the patient referred to a psychiatrist may have a wasted journey.
The other reason Vladan Starcevic's book makes me nostalgic is that it is a single-authored book dealing with a single diagnostic category. After an introductory chapter, the book consists of a chapter for each anxiety disorder. Each chapter covers diagnosis, aetiology and treatment in a multimodal way. Treatment resistance is included. Single authors usually avoid straying from their disciplinary base (psychopharmacology or psychological therapy) and so leave the tricky business of integration to the generalist reader. The strength of this book is that the author has done the work of integration. Another strength that will appeal particularly to candidates about to write the essay paper for Part II of the MRCPsych examination is the developmental approach that the author takes. Despite its title, the book is not restricted to an adult perspective and so, for example, the relationship between childhood separation disorder and later life problems is explored.
The weakness of a textbook like this is that parts of it will rapidly fall out of date, but this is not my main criticism here. I welcome many aspects of this book - the integration, the developmental viewpoint and the guide to treatment resistance - but an opportunity to go further and to take a critical stance has been missed. The book fairly reflects the debates that exist between believers, but the critical voice is missing: the voice that questions why there is so much evidence for some forms of treatment and not others, and that challenges the assumptions underlying the diagnostic systems that constrain our thinking.
eLetters
No eLetters have been published for this article.