Kaplan and Saddock has a major problem.
It has questions that aren't similar to that found on the board exam. E.g. it's study guide tells you to memorize terms like "fomre frustre" that no one uses that will not be on the exam. I'd say as much of 40% of the material it tells you to study in the study guide and in the questions aren't going to be in the exam plus it's material no other psychiatrist would even know what you're talking about.
When I first encountered that term I thought perhaps this was some type of high-end knowledge in psychiatry. I asked all of my professors and none of them knew what it was. When I went to U of Cincinnati, I asked some of, literally, the top psychiatrists in the field and they too never heard of it.
There have been landmark cases where psychiatrists testified in court and the judge angrily told the psychiatrists that none of their comments made any real sense. E.g. when asked if a person had antisocial PD and if the person was dangerous because of it the psychiatrist answered to the effect of, -Well yes, but also no. Personality is highly spiritual but it's also not. And since we're talking about personality just what is personality? I find that highly interesting. "
Judge interjects: Doctor please answer the question.
Doctor: I did.
Judge: I didn't understand anything you just said.
A major problem we have in our field is our most respected book, Kaplan and Saddock isn't the type of book that all within the field finds relevant. As a comparison, Harrison's Internal Medicine, even the biggest volumes, is highly respected with each bit of data being considered useful.
Psychiatry for decades has been in a type of paradigm where simply the cataloging of a term was an end unto itself. Terms like anwesenheit and asendesis were used as if to prove it meant you were a great psychiatrist when it didn't offer much practical value. E.g. you have a phobia of music and the psychiatrist analyzed you, told you that you got Melanophobia and because you stutter while scared fill your mouth with marbles. The use of an unheard of term made these psychiatrists seem like they knew what they were talking about when in fact they just gave you a new term for something you already knew you had.
Just a few decades ago psychiatry programs still emphasized learning classic literature. If you pulled open a green journal from decades ago a significant portion of the articles would be considered almost irrelevant, not because we've advanced, but because a modern day psychiatrist would day state the older content wasn't even psychiatry. E.g. a published article on immigration rates from Mexico or a psychiatrist's interpretation of Theseus's journey into Hades.
Much of Kaplan and Saddock is in the old paradigm where psychiatrists liked to impress people for bringing up words hardly anyone knew. It also is all over the place (not in a good way). E.g. you want to get a comprehensive source of data for schizophrenia and while it has a schizophrenia section so much information about schizophrenia is literally all over the book being mentioned here and there throughout it's several hundreds of pages outside of the schizophrenia section.
I've known people who made published board-exam prep books and they knew nothing more of the actual exam than most students. What is going on is many publishers just want to hire a doctor, ANY DOCTOR that'll write up questions. Since professors need a minimum number of publications and because the editors don't take the actual board exam themselves this is easy fodder to add a publication instead of just really publishing something substantive. Trust me, my wife and I have been asked to author textbook chapters and the publisher had very little in terms of standards.
Many of these question books are garbage. If you want to get a prep book you need to get one written by authors who want to get into the mindset of the test authors. E.g. Kaplan (no association with Kaplan and Sadock) would ask students to try to give them all the questions they could remember after the exam, hire former authors of the exam as consultants, and do actual studies to see if their prep methods worked.
The only good question book I've seen so far is Spiegel and Kenny (no relation to Kaplan and Saddock).
