Bringing together treatment and referral advice from existing guidelines, this text aims to improve access to services and recognition of common mental health disorders in adults and provide advice on the principles that need to be adopted to develop appropriate referral and local care pathways.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.

Scientific yet readable, Does Stress Cause Psychiatric Illness? is a useful guide to clinicians, clinical researchers, and medical students. Each chapter provides new empirical data that relate stress to psychiatric illness and addresses this relationship using up-to-date models.

Stress has been recognized as an important factor in the development or recurrence of various mental disorders, from major depressive disorder to bipolar disorder to anxiety disorders. Stressful stimuli also appear to exert their effects by acting upon individuals with susceptible genotypes. Over the past 50 years, animal models have been developed to study these dynamic interactions between stressful stimuli and genetically susceptible individuals during prenatal and postnatal development and into adulthood. Stress and Mental Disorders: Insights from Animal Models begins with a discussion of the history of psychiatric diagnosis and the recent goal of moving toward precision psychiatry, followed by a review of clinical research on connections between stressful stimuli and the development of psychiatric disorders. Chapters are also included on neuroendocrine, immune, and brain systems involved in responses to stress. Additional chapters focus on the development of animal models in psychiatry and the susceptibility of the developing organism to stressful stimuli. Subsequent chapters are devoted to animal models of specific stress-sensitive psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. These chapters also focus on identification of promising molecular targets for development of new drug therapies. The section concludes with a chapter on animal models of resilience to stress-induced behavioral alterations as a newer approach to understanding why some animals are susceptible to stress and others are resilient, even though they are essentially genetically identical. The final chapter discusses how these basic laboratory studies are providing promising leads for future breakthroughs in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders.

Stress Resilience: Molecular and Behavioral Aspects presents the first reference available on the full-breadth of cutting-edge research being carried out in this field. It includes a wide range of basic molecular knowledge on the potential associations between resilience phenomenon and biochemical balance, but also focuses on the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying stress resilience. World-renowned experts provide chapters that cover everything from the neural circuits of resilience, the effects of early-life adversity, and the transgenerational inheritance of resilience. This unique and timely book will be a go-to resource for neuroscientists and biological psychiatrists who want to improve their understanding of the consequences of stress and on how some people are able to avoid it.

With recent studies using genetic, epigenetic, and other molecular and neurochemical approaches, a new era has begun in understanding pathophysiology of suicide. Emerging evidence suggests that neurobiological factors are not only critical in providing potential risk factors but also provide a promising approach to develop more effective treatment and prevention strategies. The Neurobiological Basis of Suicide discusses the most recent findings in suicide neurobiology. Psychological, psychosocial, and cultural factors are important in determining the risk factors for suicide; however, they offer weak prediction and can be of little clinical use. Interestingly, cognitive characteristics are different among depressed suicidal and depressed nonsuicidal subjects, and could be involved in the development of suicidal behavior. The characterization of the neurobiological basis of suicide is in delineating the risk factors associated with suicide. The Neurobiological Basis of Suicide focuses on how and why these neurobiological factors are crucial in the pathogenic mechanisms of suicidal behavior and how these findings can be transformed into potential therapeutic applications.

The Social Determinants of Mental Health aims to fill the gap that exists in the psychiatric, scholarly, and policy-related literature on the social determinants of mental health: those factors stemming from where we learn, play, live, work, and age that impact our overall mental health and well-being. The editors and an impressive roster of chapter authors from diverse scholarly backgrounds provide detailed information on topics such as discrimination and social exclusion; adverse early life experiences; poor education; unemployment, underemployment, and job insecurity; income inequality, poverty, and neighborhood deprivation; food insecurity; poor housing quality and housing instability; adverse features of the built environment; and poor access to mental health care. This thought-provoking book offers many beneficial features for clinicians and public health professionals: Clinical vignettes are included, designed to make the content accessible to readers who are primarily clinicians and also to demonstrate the practical, individual-level applicability of the subject matter for those who typically work at the public health, population, and/or policy level. Policy implications are discussed throughout, designed to make the content accessible to readers who work primarily at the public health or population level and also to demonstrate the policy relevance of the subject matter for those who typically work at the clinical level. All chapters include five to six key points that focus on the most important content, helping to both prepare the reader with a brief overview of the chapter's main points and reinforce the "take-away" messages afterward. In addition to the main body of the book, which focuses on selected individual social determinants of mental health, the volume includes an in-depth overview that summarizes the editors' and their colleagues' conceptualization, as well as a final chapter coauthored by Dr. David Satcher, 16th Surgeon General of the United States, that serves as a "Call to Action," offering specific actions that can be taken by both clinicians and policymakers to address the social determinants of mental health. The editors have succeeded in the difficult task of balancing the individual/clinical/patient perspective and the population/public health/community point of view, while underscoring the need for both groups to work in a unified way to address the inequities in twenty-first century America. The Social Determinants of Mental Health gives readers the tools to understand and act to improve mental health and reduce risk for mental illnesses for individuals and communities. Students preparing for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) will also benefit from this book, as the MCAT in 2015 will test applicants' knowledge of social determinants of health. The social determinants of mental health are not distinct from the social determinants of physical health, although they deserve special emphasis given the prevalence and burden of poor mental health.