Both my mother and my mother-in-law died in long-term care (LTC) facilities after some years of residence, required because of their age-related disabilities and their lack of a family member able to devote themselves to their full time care. Both experienced psychiatric symptoms that required the capable attentions of specialist old age psychiatrists. Thus, if my experience is anything to go by, a new book on the provision of psychiatric consultation to LTC ought to be extremely useful.

Inevitably, much of the content of a book like this will overlap with what one might expect to find in a good textbook of Geriatric Psychiatry, but a few people will read it from cover to cover, rather they will read sections that address specific questions at times when they are relevant to the reader. There are 4 sections of 2, 6, 4, and 2 chapters covering Comprehensive mental health services, Common psychiatric disorders in LTC, Issues in LTC psychiatry, and Toward a person-centered LTC community.

Section I covers the need for high quality mental health services in LTC and has a good chapter on the comprehensive psychiatric assessment process, which would be helpful to any trainee psychiatrist or mental health professional about to start work with older people. Section II is very much DSM-5 based (as is appropriate for a North American textbook) and works through a pretty full range of disorders that might be encountered in clinical practice, from well-defined entities such as Alzheimer's disease to more dubious diagnostic constructs like explosive personality disorder. The comprehensiveness of this section is underlined by the fact that there is a paragraph on skin picking/excoriation disorder, though apart from advising referral to a dermatologist the authors have no more idea what to do with these tricky cases than I do (I can tell you from experience that boxing gloves are impractical and probably unethical). Section III deals with nutritional medicine, abuse and ethical issues, palliative and hospice medicine, and the very important and often overlooked issue of rational de-prescribing. It is a pity though that there was no separate chapter on families of LTC residents and their needs included in this section. Section IV has chapters on psychosocial-spiritual wellness for those with cognitive impairment and another on creating a person-centered LTC community.

The book is well referenced and each chapter has useful suggestions for further reading. A good case can be made for suggesting that all LTC facilities in developed countries should have a copy of this book accessible to their staff, and community-based aged psychiatry teams would also benefit from having a copy in hand. Advanced trainees in geriatric medicine and old age psychiatry, general practitioners, as well as nurses and allied health professionals who plan to spend a career working with older people should also have access. The US$ price (it retails for £59.99 in the United Kingdom) struck me as jolly reasonable and I hope that Desai and Grossberg sell a lot of copies, which are then widely read, leading to improvements in the practice of this burgeoning area of old age psychiatry.