An innovative guide for all physicians, especially psychiatrists, who are challenged to work with complex, resource demanding patients.

Preface; Forewords James Rundell, Roger Kathol, and Wolfgang Soellner; Part I. Introduction: 1. Clinical complexity: the evolving place for a medical-psychiatric coordinating physician; 2. Beyond the physician-patient model: the value of a treatment team for dealing with clinical complexity; Part II. Guidance for Negotiating Clinical Complexity: 3. Sorting out clinical complexity: medical and psychometric testing; 4. The limitations of algorithms: details of two clinically complex treatments; 5. Negotiating the subjectivity and inter-subjectivity of the clinical field: the complexity inherent in clinical work; Part III. Clinical Decisions and their Execution: Accuracy Within Complexity: 6. The intersection of data and clinical judgment: the place of subjectivity in treatment decisions; 7. Clinical strategy: grappling with treatment complexity; 8. Working consensus: the importance of physician-patient collaboration; 9. Linking truing measures: technical and interpersonal precision in work with complex cases; Part IV. The Application of the Model: The Medical-Psychiatric Coordinating Physician: 10. Managing complex treatments: the medical-psychiatric coordinating physician; 11. The medical-psychiatric coordinating physician model: its components, costs, and future; Bibliography; Index.

Steven A. Frankel, MD has practised and taught in the San Francisco Bay Area for over thirty-five years. He is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in general psychiatry as well as child and adolescent psychiatry, and has authored many professional articles and five books. His Collaborative Psychiatry Method of treatment for non-psychiatrists and psychiatrists alike, is elaborated in Evidence from Within: A Paradigm for Clinical Practice (2008), Making Psychotherapy Work: Collaborating Effectively with your Patient (2007), Hidden Faults: Recognizing and Resolving Therapeutic Disjunctions (2000) and Intricate Engagements: The Collaborative Basis of Therapeutic Change (1995, 2004). Comprehensive Care for Complex Patients: The Medical-Psychiatric Coordinating Physician Model, by Frankel, Bourgeois and Erdberg, dramatically expands the scope of his clinical model, placing a physician in the leadership position of treatment teams. A graduate of Yale Medical School, he was a National Institute of Mental Health research fellow in pharmacology at Stanford University Medical School. He then trained in psychiatry at the University of California Mount Zion Hospital and Medical Center in San Francisco, where he later joined the academic faculty. Dr Frankel then received psychoanalytic training at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, where he is a member of its faculty. He is an associate clinical professor at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco. He has been designated a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, has attained certification by the American Psychoanalytic Association, and has been voted by his peers to Best Doctors in America® every year since 1987.