Attracting medical students to a career in psychiatry has been a challenge for some time. There is a dearth of good undergraduate textbooks for psychiatry, with the currently recommended books providing more detailed information than required. This book aims to fill the gap by covering the essential knowledge students need during their placement in psychiatry.

It opens with a brief history of psychiatry, followed by a chapter on patient assessment. Other topics covered include delivery of mental healthcare, schizophrenia and psychotic disorders, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, suicide and self-harm, personality disorders, organic disorders, intellectual disabilities, substance misuse, child and adolescent psychiatry and eating disorders.

All the chapters begin with learning objectives clearly spelt out, have a concise summary highlighting the important learning points and conclude with self-assessment questions. One of the main highlights of this book is that the author has included references to art, cinema and literature. This sets it apart from the standard textbooks in psychiatry and medicine. The author has an interesting story to tell or point to make related to each subject covered, which makes for a very engaging and readable book.

The chapter on patient assessment provides a comprehensive account of assessment in psychiatry, including important aspects of history-taking, mental state examination, investigations and formulation. The important aspects of assessment are exemplified using a case study, which would be very useful for a student facing their first assessment. However, it is distracting to see series of lists rather than running text in this chapter.

The chapter on delivery of mental healthcare is a coherent account of psychiatric service provision in the UK and the list of societies and support groups outside the mainstay services will prove useful. The chapters on schizophrenia and mood disorders are presented in the standard format of epidemiology, aetiology, clinical features, diagnosis, management and prognosis but the lack of emphasis on psychological and social treatments is disappointing: the author dedicates three pages to the pharmacological management of schizophrenia, and a paragraph for psychosocial treatments.

Although the later chapters covering, among other things, anxiety disorders and personality disorders provide adequate information, they appear at times to be too brief and not as thorough as previous ones. Perhaps this reflects the relative importance allocated to these topics during medical students' placement in psychiatry, but a book purporting to be a general textbook should, ideally, provide consistent and balanced coverage of all subjects.

The author has clearly aimed this book at medical students, and this focus has been adhered to for the most part. The lack of clinical exam focus (i.e. OSCEs) may deter some exam-focused medical students. The lack of information on psychosocial aspects of management is an area for improvement in future editions. Overall, the difficult task of distilling a vast amount of information to provide a concise yet coherent and, more importantly, interesting account of psychiatry relevant to medical students seems to have been achieved in large part, and I would not hesitate to recommend it.