Customer Reviews

Prescribing Mental Health Medication: The Practitioner's Guide

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Prescribing Mental Health Medication - The Practitioner's Guide provides essential, practical and accessible information on how to prescribe and manage psychiatric medication. The layout and format of the book includes clinical tips, practice strategies and sample "scripts" for talking with clients. While there are several psychopharmacology drug guides, this reference book actually details both the conceptual and practical processes involved in prescribing psychotropic medication.

There are several comprehensive tables and mental health practice tools for medication management included with the text. Parts of the book that were especially useful and salient to every day situations included: Medicating Special Populations (children & adolescents, pregnant women, older patients), and Competent Clinical Practice (generic meds, telephone/email considerations, recordkeeping, keeping current). Several chapters also provided clear and comprehensive yet concise information on what can be complicated issues; these included the chapters on myths & truths, danger zones, starting, monitoring & stopping medication and side effects - (the author does an excellent job detailing how managing side effects is the hallmark of a knowledgeable and successful mental health practitioner).

The clinical gems offered by the author from his years of experience are outstanding and have already made a difference in my practice.

Dr. Doran covers the basics as well as some of the fine points of prescribing psychotropic medication. The book is very reader friendly and is a must have for anyone prescribing in mental health treatment.

I am new to the field of psychiatry and I found this book to be incredibly comprehensive, practical, and informative. As someone new to prescribing, I envision using much of Dr. Doran's information as a foundation to my practice.

This concise, well written guide to prescribing mental health medication is as helpful to me, a Family Nurse Practitioner who works in a low-income community health center, as it would be to a specialist working in private practice. All medical professionals are encountering more patients with mental health diagnoses and many of them require pharmacotherapy. I found this book to be very helpful in my primary care practice and encourage my colleagues and other prescribers to purchase it for their own reference collections.

This book is easy to read and has a lot of good info about many different issues that may arise in dealing with a patient who needs mental health medications.
Some of the info is known to a good provider but it also serves as a good reminder and it includes some sample appropriate conversation to use when dealing with patients - even difficult patients.