Review of Mental examiner's handbook

Abstract

Reviews the book, Mental examiner's handbook by F. L. Wells and Jurgen Ruesch (1945). The reviewer states that this is a revision of the Handbook published in 1942 which has been found very useful in psychiatric examination. It should be stressed that the Handbook is intended primarily for aid in the examination of "psychiatric" patients, that is to say, patients whose behavior deviates from the normal much more than is found in the practice of most readers of the Journal of Applied Psychology . It is divided into a section on so called "clinical" aspects, which merely attempts to list and more or less objectify the usual psychiatric examination of patients; and a section dealing with somewhat more standardized "tests" of mental functioning such as vocabulary, word association, proverb interpretation, the Kent E-G-Y questions, and so forth. According to the reviewer, the present edition is an improvement over the previous one, especially with respect to the presence of norms. It is particularly useful in the training of medical students just beginning the study of neuropsychiatry, furnishing a more or less objective set of tasks by which they may assess the patient's functioning without actually requiring a thorough study of psychometrics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)