"The book focusses mainly on another meaning of the word art: skilled practice, or craft. An inpatient CAP, who faces many difficult decisions, told us recently that her craft is not often based on treatment guidelines. She makes perhaps a hundred clinical decisions a day, of which she says only 10% have any published evidence.She is one of hundreds of clinicians, who think and debate and formulate and treat. In this most accessible of all medical fields, such forays have lessons for everyone. The book draws on the core CAP evidence base, but it is more about our other decisions. So we don't have one chapter on each diagnosis. Instead, the book is divided into three volumes: assessment, treatment, and systems.

In every chapter, we find tension and balance: between theory and practice, populations and individuals, feelings and rationality, quality and quantity, anxiety and exploration. The book is extensively cross-referenced to avoid repetition, because the same thinking patterns come up often, whether in children, families, teams, employers, or ourselves. We hope general readers will enjoy this book, as a peek into psychiatry. Managers, adult psychiatrists, psychologists, and many others, will find ideas relevant to their work. In all these areas, the best practitioners we meet rely on their thinking skills when dealing with nonstandard problems. We have tried to capture many of those skills in this book, for people who must do a lot of their work off-piste, guided not by a protocol but by values, intuition, general knowledge, and careful thinking"--.