Evaluation of the Psychiatric Patient

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

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2. The Problems of Evaluation in Psychiatry

   • Seymour L. Halleck

   Pages 1-20

3. Obtaining Information from the Patient

   • Seymour L. Halleck

   Pages 21-51

4. Taking the History: Part I

   • Seymour L. Halleck

   Pages 53-81

5. Taking the History: Part II

   • Seymour L. Halleck

   Pages 83-110

6. Evaluating the Patient’s Current Situation and Personality Traits

   • Seymour L. Halleck

   Pages 111-136

7. The Mental Status Examination

   • Seymour L. Halleck

   Pages 137-177

8. Additional Procedures and Tests in the Diagnostic Process, Laboratory Testing, Electroencephalogram, Imaging, and Psychological Testing

   • Seymour L. Halleck

   Pages 179-189

9. Evaluation of Capacities in Psychiatry

   • Seymour L. Halleck

   Pages 191-208

10. Back Matter

    Pages 209-216

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A few months before the final manuscript of this book was sent to the publisher, Dr. Karl A. Menninger died, shortly before his ninety­ seventh birthday. Thus, when I sat down to write this preface, he was very much on my mind. I remembered that it had been almost forty years since he wrote A Manual for Psychiatric Case Study, not one of his well-known but probably the most practical of his books. The psycho­ analytically trained part of me began to wonder what had motivated me to write a book on a topic so similar to that which had earlier drawn the attention of my revered teacher. There is no pressing need for another book on psychiatric evaluation; furthermore, evaluation is a very diffi­ cult subject to write about in a straightforward way. Whatever my unconscious motivations may have been, I hope they were less significant than those of which I was aware. I wrote this book mainly as part of an effort to reverse certain trends in psychiatric educa­ tion. In the last decade psychiatrists have increasingly been trained in an environment that emphasizes brief evaluation of patients and de­ emphasizes teaching about the complexity of human behavior and ex­ perience. Trainees no longer study psychiatric evaluation in a systematic manner. They take fewer intensive histories, fill out forms instead of describing the patient's mental status, and, with rare exceptions, are not taught how to conceptualize biological and psychosocial interactions.

• attention
• electroencephalography (EEG)
• evaluation
• interaction
• Motivation
• personality
• psychiatry

• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

  Seymour L. Halleck

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