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Clinical Manual of Addiction Psychopharmacology, 2nd Edition. Edited by Henry R. Kranzler, Domenic A. Ciraulo and Leah R. Zindel (463pp.; ISBN 978-1-58562-440-9). American Psychiatric Publishing, Paperback, 2014.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2014

Daniel Clear  and
Colin O'gara
Daniel Clear*
Affiliation:
St John of God Hospital, Dublin
Colin O'gara
Affiliation:
St John of God Hospital, Dublin
*
(Email: daniel.clear@sjog.ie)
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Type
Book Reviews
Information
Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 289
Copyright
© College of Psychiatrists of Ireland 2014 

This manual is a comprehensive and well-written review of the current knowledge on the pharmacology of drugs of abuse and the pharmacological treatment options available to physicians treating addiction disorders. It is divided into 10 chapters, with nine chapters each focussing on a single class of substance and the 10th addressing the psychotherapies for substance use disorders. The chapters are ordered according to a combination of prevalence of use and availability of pharmacotherapy options, highlighting the relative interest and progress from the pharmaceutical industry in the various addictive conditions.

The chapters on substances are intuitively laid out and cover areas such as natural history and epidemiology, neurobiology, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, issues around dependence and withdrawal, and pharmacological treatment options. Each section is exhaustively referenced with up-to-date studies.

The authors provide a particularly thorough overview of the pharmacology of the various drugs of abuse, and in doing so succeed in their stated aim of providing a basis for medications development across the range of addictive disorders, notably in the areas most obviously lacking in pharmaceutical interest such as the treatment of stimulant, cocaine and cannabis dependence.

The manual functions as an excellent clinical resource for the pharmacological treatment of withdrawal states and maintenance therapies, and provides extensively referenced and current evidence-based recommendations for the clinical management of such patients. The authors also make excellent use of tables and graphs to present complex information in a clear and accessible manner.

The 10th chapter comprises a review of the literature on psychotherapies, and outlines the major psychotherapeutic resources available to practitioners in the field of addiction. It also includes a very interesting section on the interactions of psychotherapy and pharmacological treatments that has proved crucial for abstinence maintenance in an important subset of patients.

The breadth of knowledge in this comprehensive and systematically presented manual will serve as an excellent guide both for those working in clinical addiction psychiatry as well as those with a research interest in this burgeoning clinical speciality.