This textbook is written in accordance with all the demands for such publications. Its speciality marked is the authors to set a goal to formulate the content of the subject basing on the data of the classical psychiatry. Its foundation was formed in the works of outstanding psychiatrists. These scientists had determined not only the most important psychopathological symptoms and syndromes, but had identified individual nosological forms of psychoses. W. Kandinsky, S. Korsakoff, V. Bekhterev, V. Gilyarovsky, P. Gannushkin, A. Snezhevsky, V. Morozov, Ph. Pinel, J. Esquirol, B. Morel, W. Griesinger, E. Kraepelin, C. Wernicke, E. Bleuler, and their students are a galaxy of outstanding figures of Russian and foreign psychiatry. They became the creators of the science of the main chapter about mental diseases, their diagnostics and therapy. Nowadays, psychiatry is closely connected with other related areas of knowledge: psychology, sociology, ethics, biology, and genetics. It follows the leads of epistemology solving problems of etiopathogenetic diagnostics, treatment and prognosis of mental diseases. Such didactic approach determined the structure of the textbook. The description of the material begins from the historical analysis of the scientific evolution, the problem of systematisation of psychoses. This gives a possibility to expose problems of psychiatric propaedeutic more deeply, to describe the methods of research of the mental patients? observation exactly. The latter is of the practical importance of the first order.
The section of general psychopathology is exposed brilliantly and convincingly. The authors consider descriptive psychopathology from the viewpoint of evolutionary formation of the mental diseases categorical apparatus semiotics. Applying this approach, it is natural for the authors to give an idea of the most important symptoms and syndromes (hallucinations, pseu-dohallucinations, delirium, mania, melancholy, dysmnesia, and amnesia) following the ad fontes (to the source) principle. The authors based their research on the initial definitions of these categories in the works of the classical scholars (S. Korsakoff, J. Baillarger, G. Clerambault, W. Mayer-Gross et al.).