Kaplan and Sadocks Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 11e

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Preface

Williams, M.D., and Lindsay Moskowitz, M.D., both respected edu cators. That volume, used independently or alongside the Synopsis , represents a further example of our commitment to education. One of the best ways to learn new material is through self-assessment, and we produced the Study Guide with that purpose in mind. Acknowledgments Over time, thousands of psychiatric, mental health, and other experts have contributed to this book. Many are long gone, but they have put their mark on the current volume, and we appreciate them all. We also thank the hundreds of authors who often endured work pres sures, the pandemic, and our nagging as they took on the challenge of summarizing their fields. They put in an incredible effort, the results are remarkable, and we gratefully thank them all. We give special thanks to the section editors of this book. A book of this size is well beyond our abilities to review as thoroughly as we would wish, and these editors took on the lion’s share of the oversite in their sections. These editors include Iqbal “Ike” Ahmed, M.D., Gaston Baslet, M.D., Carlyle Chan, M.D., Dilip Jeste, M.D., John Krystal, M.D., Roberto Lewis-Fernández, M.D., Kathleen Merikan gas, Ph.D., Christine Yu Moutier, M.D., Caroly Pataki, M.D., Joji Suzuki, M.D., Carol Tamminga, M.D., Sasson Zemach, M.D., and Joseph Zohar, M.D. It would be a wild understatement to say that we could not have done this without them, and we owe them all a lasting debt of gratitude. We owe a similar debt to the publishing team at Wolters Kluwer. Particular thanks go to Chris Teja, our Acquisitions Editor; Anne Malcolm, the Associate Director for Content Development; Ariel S. Winter, our Development Editor; and most of all, Sean Hanrahan and Erin Hernandez, Editorial Coordinators, who had the dubious plea sure of being in almost daily communication with us. We want to acknowledge our respective institutions and universi ties, The Menninger Clinic, The Baylor College of Medicine, and the University of Central Florida, for their enduring support in our careers. Finally, we remain always thankful to Ben and Virginia Sadock, who are wonderful people and great scholars, for creating what we consider the finest textbooks in psychiatry and trusting us to continue the tradition.

more references than we can include contribute to the ideas and facts in a chapter. We accept that this is the nature of works that attempt to review massive fields of study. Hopefully, readers will appreciate the reasons for and results of this approach. If you do not, please under stand that this decision was ours alone. The limitation in this approach, we realize, is somewhat miti gated by the connected world we live in, where interested readers can quickly and easily search for relevant papers online—accessibility likely to be broadened by the advances in artificial intelligence. Such intelligent systems are already producing reviews of complicated subjects, albeit with mixed results. Will that field advance so dramat ically that we will not need further editions of this book? We doubt it. When we reflect on the most important influences in our education as psychiatrists, we do not recount the countless computer screens we have viewed. Instead, we remember the fantastic psychiatrists and other experts who taught us throughout our training and careers. We are delighted to say that we had the opportunity to include some of them in this book. Although the written word will never equal the power of a human relationship, we hope that the chance to sit down and read the thoughts of the many expert minds found here will be an experience we all can appreciate long into the future. OUR MISSION STATEMENT Our mission is to educate mental health and related professionals in contemporary psychiatry. We emphasize the word “educate.” Today, there is no end to infor mation sources. What we seek here is not one more repository of facts but rather a system of education that is complete, authoritative, and accessible. This book represents a crucial part of that mission, being the most comprehensive of the books. However, it is part of a series of books devoted to psychiatric education. Also included are the Synopsis of Psychiatry , a distillation of this book into a single vol ume, and the Concise Textbook of Psychiatry , which further reduces the Synopsis , concentrating on the most clinically relevant sections of the book. Also related are books devoted to subspecialties in psy chiatry, most notably the Concise Textbook of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry , edited by child psychiatrist Caroly Pataki, M.D. We are considering other specialty volumes as well. Finally, the Study Guide and Self-Examination Review of Psychiatry are written by Eric

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