Trauma- and stress-related disorders are encountered by most psychiatrists regularly. However, with the notable exception of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), they have received little academic attention. Other conditions considered more severe, such as depressive disorders, attract more interest and more research funding. Casey & Strain's book provides a much-needed guide to these debilitating but neglected conditions. The authors question whether the common stressor-related conditions of adjustment disorder (AD) and acute stress disorder (ASD) are mild sub-threshold conditions or threshold psychopathology.

The charge of ‘the medicalisation of ordinary suffering’ is one frequently levelled at psychiatry – a criticism based on the popular misconception that psychiatry views unhappiness, and even life itself, as pathology rather than as a core aspect of the human condition. Some academics have argued against the vagueness of the diagnosis and diagnostic criteria of AD and ASD, although this very factor makes them useful in clinical practice. Psychiatrists need the categories of ASD and AD to acknowledge distress with functional impairment which is in excess of cultural norms, without the need for a diagnosis of a depressive illness or anxiety disorder and its attendant ramifications for prognosis and treatment.

Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders provides a succinct, thorough overview of these conditions, without eschewing the controversies. The opening chapter sets the tone with the oft-debated topic of the borderline between normal and pathological responses to stress. Four chapters are dedicated to the much neglected diagnosis of AD, then one chapter each for ASD, PTSD, dissociation and bereavement. The final three chapters add further considerations: resilience in the genesis of these disorders, medico-legal matters, and the future for stress-bound conditions in the diagnostic criteria. The authors confront the controversies surrounding these diagnoses head-on, and stress the central role of the art of psychiatry: clinical judgement. The importance of clinical judgement, the skill of combining it with the diagnostic criteria and a nuanced understanding of the context and personalities in which disorders arise, is a strong theme in this book.