Kaplan and Sadocks Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 11e

Preface

International Classification of Diseases (ICD) have had updates since the last edition of this textbook. In the case of the DSM, the change is relatively modest, representing a textual revision of the fifth edi tion (DSM-5-TR). The ICD has undergone a more significant revi sion, updating much of the descriptions and nomenclature for many diseases to reflect advancing medical science. The WHO approved ICD-11 in 2019 and committed to transitioning to the newer system in 2022. For mental health professionals, the most significant change is in their efforts to align ICD with DSM, with more similar terminol ogy and approaches to mental diseases than the previous versions. This revision will simplify things, particularly for hospital systems that rely on the ICD for classification and billing. However, the United States has classically been slow to adopt ICD changes, taking about 10 years for the last one. The United States hopes to transition to the newer nomenclature by 2025, although its full adoption may take longer. You can read more about these approaches and the results in this book’s section on Classification in Psychiatry. The book’s many other revisions are too many to relate here, but they will be evident as you read it. Hopefully, readers will also appre ciate the book’s continued attempt, long championed by the Sadocks, to keep the book readable. As editors, we agree with the maxim, usu ally attributed to Einstein, that “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” However, we are also mindful of the other Einstein attribution, “Everything should be made as sim ple as possible, but no simpler.” With that in mind, our contributors and we worked hard to make the book as readable as possible while maintaining its high scientific rigor. We wanted this book to be more than a compendium of facts, but rather something we would want to sit down and read—if not cover to cover, then at least through an entire chapter. Being the first to read the book as we edited it, we believe the many authors who contributed to this work have done an awe-inspiring job achieving that. We learned a great deal and enjoyed doing it. At least most of the time. One aspect of the challenge to balance rigor and readability is the decision to omit within-text citations and limit the references. This approach has been a longstanding policy of this and many other standard textbooks; however, it made many of our authors uncomfortable. Their concern is that readers will see their chapter as unscientific “pop science” or just their opinion. Some even wor ried about ethical considerations: whether it would appear that they were presenting the work of others as if it was theirs. We trust that the readers will understand otherwise. We all intend each chapter to be a rigorous review of existing literature. Usually, a complete reflec tion of the many sources contributing to each chapter would require hundreds, if not thousands, of citations and references, making the result unwieldy. We trust that the readers will understand that each chapter represents the authors’ synthesis of the many sources they reviewed to create a coherent work. Each chapter does list critical references at the end for further study. However, in most cases, many

The Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry was conceived in the 1960s when Harold Kaplan, MD, saw the need for a scholarly text book in the style of the great medical textbooks. He published the first edition in 1967. Then, it was one volume with about 600 pages. However, as you see, it has grown considerably! Much of the book’s growth occurred under the remarkable careers of Benjamin and Virginia Sadock, both psychiatrists at the New York University School of Medicine, who coedited many of the vol umes with Dr. Kaplan and then took on the book’s leadership after Dr. Kaplan’s death in 1998. They continued updating and revising the book through the 10th edition, published in 2017. Over the book’s course, they oversaw an expansion to two vol umes and more than 5,000 pages, with more than 600 contributors. This growth reflects the fantastic expansion of the field of psychiatry, with advances in neuroscience, pharmacology, psychological theory and practice, cultural psychiatry, sociology, and many other affiliated areas. To accommodate this, the Sadocks organized the book into dif ferent subject area sections, each with an expert contributing editor. With the Sadocks’ retirement, the publishers sought a new set of editors who would respect the mission of these books. We are honored to have been chosen and appreciate the faith the Sadocks have put in us to continue their wonderful tradition. Long-time consumers of the Kaplan and Sadock series (one of us remem bers buying the fifth edition during residency [RB]) and then the Sadock and Sadock series of books, we understand all too well the care and thought that has gone into both the organization and writing of these volumes. With that in mind, we have chosen an incremental approach. Thus, whereas some previous editions saw dramatic changes in subject matter or organization, this book will look similar to the last volume, at least superficially. Some chapters have been added and some removed, but the organization remains unchanged. The reader will find a few notable exceptions to this rule, where advances had outpaced the previous edition’s approach. For example, readers will find significant changes in the organiza tion and chapters in our biologic treatments section and the cultural and global psychiatry content. The most significant change is the knowledge contained. Psychia try is moving ever-increasingly, making this an exciting time to be in the field. We asked each author to update their content and review the latest research in their field. At times this has meant adding or replacing authors. Indeed, a sad part of our jobs was learning of the passing of several distinguished authors. This unfortunate experience was perhaps made more common during this ongoing pandemic. In many cases, the new authors retained much of the format and detail from the previous volumes and acknowledged their predecessors’ work in their new chapters. One practical update is in psychiatric classification. Both the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Man ual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the World Health Organization’s

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