The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to sponsor continuing medical education for physicians.

The aim of the American Psychiatric Association Practice Guideline series is to improve patient care. Guidelines provide a comprehensive synthesis of all available information relevant to the clinical topic. Practice guidelines can be vehicles for educating psychiatrists, other medical and mental health professionals, and the general public about appropriate and inappropriate treatments. The series also will identify those areas in which critical information is lacking and in which research could be expected to improve clinical decisions. The Practice Guidelines are also designed to help those charged with overseeing the utilization and reimbursement of psychiatric services to develop more scientifically based and clinically sensitive criteria.

The guideline focuses specifically on evidence-based pharmacological treatments for AUD in outpatient settings and includes additional information on assessment and treatment planning, which are an integral part of using pharmacotherapy to treat AUD.

The book provides treatment recommendations for bipolar patients, a review of evidence about bipolar disorder, and states research needs

The guideline offers clear, concise, and actionable recommendation statements to help clinicians to incorporate recommendations into clinical practice, with the goal of improving quality of care. Each recommendation is given a rating that reflects the level of confidence that potential benefits of an intervention outweigh potential harms.

The most common personality disorder here and abroad, borderline personality disorder is often misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed. Left untreated, it causes marked distress and impairment in social, occupational, and role functioning, with high rates of self-destructive behavior (attempted and completed suicide). Its pervasive pattern of impulsivity and instability of interpersonal relationships, affects, and self-image begins in early adulthood and presents in a variety of contexts. Developed primarily by psychiatrists in active clinical practice, the revised edition of this popular work offers an updated synthesis of current scientific knowledge and rational clinical practice for patients with borderline personality disorder -- with the important caveat that clinicians should consider, but not limit themselves to, the treatments recommended here. The summary of treatment recommendations is keyed according to the level of confidence with which each recommendation is made and coded to show the nature of its supporting evidence. Highly informative and easy to use, this eminently practical volume is organized into three major parts: Part A contains treatment recommendations (Section I, treatment summaries; Section II, treatment plans; Section III, special clinical considerations; and Section IV, risk management issues during treatment), Part B presents the evidence underlying these treatment recommendations (Section V, an overview of DSM-IV-TR criteria, prevalence rates, and natural history and course; and Section VI, a review of existing treatment literature), and Part C summarizes those areas in which better research data are needed. Remarkably concise and comprehensive, this practice guideline continues to be an indispensable reference for every clinician who treats patients with this heterogeneous and complex disorder.

Contains Quick Reference Guides (QRGs) to all of the published APA Practice Guidelines. QRGs are created by abstracting the crucial information from the text of the full guideline, with greatest emphasis placed on retaining the material most directly relevant to the treatment decision making, and are intended for day-to-day work with patients. This compendium contains 10 quick reference guides: Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias of Late Life Borderline Personality Disorder Bipolar Disorder Delirium Eating Disorders HIV/AIDS Major Depressive Disorder Panic Disorder Schizophrenia Suicide Each guide is derived from the full text of a practice guideline developed by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and published originally in "The American Journal of Psychiatry," The purpose of these QRGs is to facilitate clinical use of APA's practice guidelines by physicians. Although the practice guidelines provide detailed recommendations for treatment and comprehensively describe the evidence to support those recommendations, their length and text format do not allow for easy use in the psychiatrist's day-to-day work with patients. hese guidelines help you: Understand clinical features and symptoms Make a confident differential diagnosis Evaluate interventions commonly used to treat specific disorders Select the appropriate site of service Educate the patient and family Assess the efficacy and risks of available medications Develop an individualized treatment plan Central to proper use of these QRGs is recognition that they do not stand alone. The psychiatrist using them should be familiar with the full-text practice guideline on which each QRG is based. For clarification of arecommendation or for a review of the evidence supporting a particular strategy, the psychiatrist will find it helpful to return to the guideline. With rare exception the QRG faithfully reflects the content of the guideline. Exceptions are specifically noted in the QRG. Each quick reference guide presents the major recommendations and their sequencing with enough detail to be both clinically helpful and practical to use.