Psychiatry: Past, Present, and Prospect brings together perspectives from a group of highly respected psychiatrists, each with decades of experience in clinical practice. The topics covered range from scientific discoveries of all kinds, advances in treatment, and conceptual breakthroughs. The highlights are countered by the field's negative sides: perennial indecisiveness about the boundaries of psychiatry; the limitations of a narrow approach to human suffering; the retreat from the hope of a de-institutionalised, community-based psychiatry; the divide between biological treatments and psychotherapy; the technical and ethical complexities of psychiatric research; and the low priority given to psychiatry, especially but far from exclusively in less developed countries.
The result is a text full of collected wisdom which will promote the curiosity of mental health professionals about key developments in psychiatry over the past half century; sensitize the next generation of mental health professionals to the role they might play in advancing the state of knowledge about mental illness and its treatment during the course of their careers; and serve as a valuable archival resource for scholars.
This collection of viewpoints from very experienced leaders in the field of psychiatry will prove fascinating reading for psychiatrists and allied mental health professionals, such as psychologists, psychiatric social workers, psychiatric nurses and occupational therapists, both trained and in training. It will also offer the interested laity a balanced account of psychiatry's evolution since the 1950s, and its likely prospects in the 21st century.

Sidney Bloch, Emeritus Professor and Honorary Consultant, University of Melbourne and St Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne, Australia,Stephen A. Green, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington DC, USA,Jeremy Holmes, School of Psychology, University of Exeter, UK

1. Neuroscience, Steven Hyman
2. Psychiatric genetics, Peter McGuffin
3. Clinical research with a focus on schizophrenia, Vishal Bhavsar and Robin M Murray
4. Epidemiology and causality, Dana March and Ezra Susser
5. Cultural psychiatry, Anne Becker and Arthur Kleinman
6. Community psychiatry, Julian Leff
7. Psychiatry in developing countries, Norman Sartorius
8. Mental health law, George Szmukler
9. Psychiatric ethics, Stephen Green and Sidney Bloch
10. Diagnosis and classification, German Berrios
11. Consultation-liaison psychiatry, Don Lipsitt
12. Child and adolescent psychiatry, Michael Rutter
13. Psychiatry of the elderly, Catherine Oppenheimer
14. Forensic psychiatry, Paul E Mullen and Danny H Sullivan
15. Psychological trauma, Arieh Shalev
16. The addictions, Jerome Jaffe
17. Personality disorders, Edwin Harari
18. Psychopharmacology, Philip B. Mitchell and Dusan Hadzi-Pavlovic
19. Convulsive therapies, Max Fink
20. Cognitive-behaviour therapy, Aaron T. Beck and David J. A. Dozois
21. Psychodynamic psychiatry, Jeremy Holmes