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(More customer reviews)As a third-year psychiatry resident, I am in the midst of training, constantly trying to acquire clinical experience and to better understand my patients, as well as the field of psychiatry.
I found "Trouble in Mind" thought-provoking and extremely well-written. I would certainly recommend the book to any student or resident looking for an in-depth inquiry into psychiatry and psychopathology. Anyone who is concerned about the epistemological roots of psychiatry, or thinking about the underlying "edifice" of psychiatry, in this age of emerging and revisionary DSM classifications and evolving nosology, would be very well-served by this book.
In "Trouble in Mind", Dr. MacKinnon seems to have deftly woven a new potential paradigm for approaching patients afflicted with mental illness, by depicting the mind and mental life, on different explanatory levels. For each progressive level of the mind portrayed in the book, he articulates a description of function, as well as an associated pathologic disruption that may be seen in a patient presenting with a mental illness.
Beginning with the "elementary mind", Dr. MacKinnon reviews basic biological "input and output functions" of the mind, such as arousal, appetite, and perception, and then describes their associated disruptions as they may present in a clinical setting, including delirium, or disorders of appetite, or hallucinations. He then progresses to the "integral mind", describing functions of mental life such as attention, memory, habit, and motive, and also describes their disruptions including distraction, amnesia, addiction, or anhedonia. In the "synthetic mind", he advances his model to describe secondary functions of mental life such as bias, personality, and belief, and here too describes associated dysfunction. Lastly, he describes the "psychiatric mind" by describing different realms of mental illness, including psychosis, affective illness, neurosis, and anguish.
Dr. MacKinnon's model of the mind and mental illness struck me as boldly creative, exciting, and refreshing. I found the book especially engaging since it seems to be borne of rich clinical experience; the book and its appendix sections contain brief clinical vignettes and clinical case examples throughout.
Happy Reading!
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Orthodox psychiatric texts are often rich in facts, but thin in concept. Depression may be defined as a dysfunction of mood, but of what use is a mood? How can anxiety be both symptom and adaptation to stress? What links the disparate disabilities of perception and reasoning in schizophrenia? Why does the same situation push one person into drink, drugs, danger, or despair and bounce harmlessly off another? Trouble in Mind is unorthodox because it models adaptive mental function along with mental illness to answer questions like these. From experience as a Johns Hopkins clinician, educator, and researcher, Dean F. MacKinnon offers a unique perspective on the nature of human anguish, unreason, disability, and self-destruction. He shows what mental illness can teach about the mind, from molecules to memory to motivation to meaning.MacKinnon's fascinating model of the mind as a vital function will enlighten anyone intrigued by the mysteries of thought, feeling, and behavior. Clinicians in training will especially appreciate the way mental illness can illuminate normal mental processes, as medical illness in general teaches about normal body functions. For students, the book also includes useful guides to psychiatric assessment and diagnosis.
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