Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology: Neuroscientific Basis and Practical Applications

Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology is a classic for a reason, it’s a solid psychopharmacology text that goes in depth with strong readability into mechanisms of mental illnesses and the mechanisms of drugs available to treat them. The criticisms of Dr. Stahl are well-known, including the multi-million dollar consulting fees he’s ostensibly received from pharma companies for decades. Those criticisms are worth keeping in mind when reading his books, however it should also be kept in mind that the reality is his writing is very readable while simultaneously being very strong and coherent on explaining the science in depth. His illustrations of course, are world famous, and facilitate understanding of highly complex material substantially.. Dr. Stahl’s renowned work for the State Hospital System in California provides an additional point worth keeping in mind about the author and the credibility of his material, namely that he is a practitioner with a vast amount of real world experience rather than just a university academic. Finally his work in establishing and operating the Neuroscience Education Institute makes available a vast amount of supplementary educational material to facilitate both mastery of the material covered in the book as well as continuing UPDATES to the material in the book AND an additional wealth of material that goes well beyond what is in the book to further explore the topics in question. An NEI membership requires an additional few hundred dollars a year, but for that you get far more than your money’s worth. For starters you get a video lecture series by Dr. Stahl himself covering the material in the book in lecture form, which is a FANTASTIC supplement to the material in the book and something which I found very helpful in extracting the major points Dr. Stahl wants to get across as well as well as understanding the details. Additionally you get videos of the presentations made at the NEI conferences by Stahl as well as dozens of other doctors that go into depth on all the psychopharmacology topics you could want, summarizing new research, providing in depth explanations that go beyond even what is in Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology and going into more advanced topics as well to provide continuing learning.I have copies of Julien’s Primer, Goodman & Gilman, Kaplan & Sadock, Schatzberg, Ghaemi and some other texts on psychopharmacology, all of which are good in their own right and some of which are more advanced than Stahl on certain topics, but as a book to take you from not knowing psychopharmacology at all to knowing a great deal about it, Stahl challenges or outright beats them all on readability, depth of scientific and technical explanation, and blows them out of the water on visual illustrations. More importantly though, none of them have anything close to the power of the ecosystem of additional learning and continuing education material that Dr. Stahl has built around this book, including both the NEI stuff mentioned above as well as the additional Stahl Psychopharmacology books.Now that I’ve given a review that probably sounds more like a promo for Stahl to some, I’ll say that I wouldn’t consider myself a Stahlite (as some call those who flock to his teachings), as I said above, there are criticisms of him, which are worth thinking about, however I also believe in acknowledging the reality that there is a lot of credit and recognition due to him and his work given his experience and the substantial body of material he has constructed to spread knowledge in psychopharmacology.And for those wondering why I’ve given such attention to Stahl himself here? For one, the TOC is free in the amazon preview if you want to know the book contents. And two he’s the guy who wrote it, he’s the guy who is going to be teaching you all of the great material in the book and he’s the guy you’re going to be relying on to have his facts and his understanding straight. As an avid reader of technical material and textbooks I can say that it becomes apparent after a time just how important it is to have confidence in your author and to understand who they are in relation to the material they’re discussing, it tells you what you can rely on and what kind of interpretation to give to the material… and yes, even dry scientific material like this must be interpreted thoughtfully, it can often seem like dry recitation of fact, but someone had to review all the research and decide the major points to make and the details to include to support them, someone had to DO that research in the first place, someone had to decide what to publish (and more importantly believe it or not, someone had to decide what research would NOT be published… the so-called file-drawer phenomenon) and someone had to do the write-up, to decide what statistical analyses to run, what statistical data to report and what to leave out. To know what a book really offers to tell you, know the author.

This is a fantastic reference book on pharmacology related to psychiatric medication’s. Great graphics, easy to use in reference. Great products.

Very good.

I have been using this book when teaching courses about psychiatric medications for some two decades. This new edition has updated content and, as always, presents very complex mechanisms in ways that are fun and easier to grasp. While many of Stahl's explanations are based more in theory than practice, this is still the definitive reference to the pharmacodynamics of psychotropic medications.

I did take this to my local printer to have is spiral bound so it is easier to use.

I rarely use my hard copy of this book but sometimes I don’t feel like reading on my computer. I’ve probably picked this book up maybe 5-10x since last August and it’s falling apart. Make a better binding! 4/5 stars because it is well written. 1 star off bc the binding is awful.

I just started using it about a month after the return window closed and now the pages are coming loose from the spine.

The first 17 pages of chapter 13 are missing!