Textbooks in Residency

[Stagg737]

As mentioned in a recent thread, I had some CME money left over this year and one of the textbooks I recently got was the comprehensive Kaplan and Sadock since I see it referenced all the time, especially with practice PRITE questions. I started looking through it and realized that it's over 4,000 pages long with some very specific chapters and subject matter. I've been reading journal articles and using textbooks and other sources as references for most of my learning so far and I haven't really read any textbooks in depth/cover-to-cover yet. So I was curious about other people's perspectives on a few things:

1. Has anyone actually fully read Kaplan and Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry? If so, how long did it take you?
2. Do most other people actually sit down and fully read textbooks, or are you mostly using them as references for in gaps in knowledge or just reading selective chapters?
3. For those who do read textbooks more thoroughly, what are the "Must have" textbooks for various areas of psych (other than DSM).

Specifically curious about books for:
- Psychotherapy
- Pharm (what's your comprehensive go-to book)
- Addiction
- CAP

Bonus for any recommendations which are really good specifically for anxiety.

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[Monocles]

Your mileage may vary... I rarely used textbooks and our affiliated university had digital copies of them anyway so I sold all of them brand new shrink wrapped for about $1k total on amazon.

I had other coresidents who supposedly read their textbooks cover to cover... or so they say.

 

[FlowRate]

The only textbook I actually read through in its entirety was the MGH CL handbook before my med school CL sub-I. For therapy you're usually reading something more between a novel/opinion piece and a textbook. Or maybe you're reading a compilation of treatment manuals (we were required to buy basically that for our CBT course.) I own a few other textbooks, some of which I may end up reading (clinical neuro for psychiatrists.) I haven't found something I really like as a primary psychopharm source. My usual combination is Maudsley and Stahl--I wish Stahl did a better job really spelling out recommended guides for labs to order (and frequency/level) and discontinuation/switch strategies. The problem is in part that there isn't exactly an "evidence base" for these things as much as there are various recommended guidelines.

 

[romanticscience]

I never read through K&S cover to cover. It's really a psychiatry encyclopedia and I realized there are better individual texts for certain topics. Here were my main drivers for psychopharm and psychotherapy in residency (wasn't interested much in addiction and CAP).

Psychotherapy
- Psychodynamic Therapy for Personality Pathology (Caligor et al., 2019)
* Summation of the work of the Cornell Personality Disorder Group/Otto Kernberg et al. (Borderline personality disorders psychiatrists and psychotherapists at the Personality Disorders Institute: mental health professionals)
- Good psychiatric management for BPD (Gunderson et al., 2015)

Pharm (what's your comprehensive go-to book)
- Maudsley Prescriber Guidelines (Taylor et al., 2018).
- Clinical Psychopharmacology: Principles and Practice (Ghaemi, 2019).
- Stahl Prescriber Guide (Stahl, 2017)
- Package inserts (DailyMed)
* Surprisingly good info in these, that you don't find in textbooks, especially the clinical trial information.

 

[Orgone]

Another vote for never having read a full textbook cover to cover. Unless you count Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology. Bought K&S, opened it maybe 3 times. Didn't find it all that useful when I did, referencing journals or other texts was more efficient.

Favorite book I read in residency was The Psychiatric Interview by Carlat.

 

[clausewitz2]

I read a lot but haven't found so many textbooks to be super useful as cover to cover exercises. Some exceptions:

-OCD edited by Pittenger. I feel like I learned something interesting on almost every page

-Manic Depressive Illness edited by Goodwin and Jamison 2nd ed. It is getting on in age but it remains a really thorough summation of a particular perspective of psychiatry and has some excellent phenomenological observations I hadn't seen elsewhere.

-Secondary Schizophrenia ed. by Keshavaun. Very useful in thinking through potential etiologies of schizophrenia-like psychoses

-Process-based CBT Ed. by Hayes and Hafmann. The chapter on philosophy of psychology alone is worth its weight in gold but the whole thing helped me change how I think about psychotherapeutic interventions and kick my medical training mental habit that says for every particular problem, there is a specific and exclusive intervention that must be 100% tailored for it and anything else is quackery. No.

 

[splik]

I read a lot but haven't found so many textbooks to be super useful as cover to cover exercises. Some exceptions:

-OCD edited by Pittenger. I feel like I learned something interesting on almost every page

only someone with OCD could read a textbook on OCD cover-to-cover

-Manic Depressive Illness edited by Goodwin and Jamison 2nd ed. It is getting on in age but it remains a really thorough summation of a particular perspective of psychiatry and has some excellent phenomenological observations I hadn't seen elsewhere.

One thing I love about psychiatry is our textbooks never go out of date (well maybe the attached in the OHSU psychiatry library on frigidity in women and the treatment of homosexuality). The original 1990 text on Manic-Depressive Illness is even better! And nowadays, if you want to learn about typical antipsychotics you need to get a psychopharm book from the 1980s.

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[Stagg737]

Another vote for never having read a full textbook cover to cover. Unless you count Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology. Bought K&S, opened it maybe 3 times. Didn't find it all that useful when I did, referencing journals or other texts was more efficient.

Favorite book I read in residency was The Psychiatric Interview by Carlat.

Have the little Carlat book. It's a nice little reference, especially when I'm having a brain-fart and need some descriptive terminology, but wasn't a huge fan overall.

some excellent phenomenological observations

Can you give a brief example or two? I've got a decent supply of 20+ year old books but am not really sure which are still valid and which are outdated. Any other suggestions? @splik

 

[NickNaylor]

I haven't cracked open a reference text in quite some time, and even then it was for academic work unrelated to "studying." I much prefer reading primary literature or more pragmatic texts over a reference text. While reference texts are great, they tend to be way too dense to use as a primary learning resource in my opinion.