The goal of Essentials of Psychiatry in Primary Care is not to make psychiatrists out of medical clinicians, but rather, to help clinicians manage common behavioral conditions that most often present in a medical setting.

Essentials of Psychiatry in Primary Care seeks to integrate medicine and psychiatry --- as the authors’ systems-based biopsychosocial model proposes. The book identifies physical symptoms as a common mode of presentation of mental health problems and describes how to integrate them with psychological symptoms to make diagnoses of mental disorders. Essentials of Psychiatry in Primary Care also details a behaviorally defined, evidence-based mental healthcare model that can be effectively used in a medical setting.

The combined experiences in primary care of the authors --- who specialize in both general internal medicine and psychiatry --- provide the perfect background for a book of this nature. Having trained medical students, as well as internal and family medicine residents since 1986, their experience and research demonstrates the information they outline is effective and associated with improved mental and physical health outcomes.