“Psychological Disorders: The Science of Mental Health” v1.0 Is Built on the DSM-5-TR’s Organizational Structure

Author Dr. Alan Smerbeck, Associate Professor of Psychology at Rochester Institute of Technology and a New York State licensed psychologist, has helped build and validate cognitive tests used by clinicians and researchers internationally. Smerbeck’s intention in writing this first edition was to correct a problem in the field: the longstanding textbooks for psychopathology courses, now in their ninth and twelfth editions, are still built on the DSM-IV’s organizational structure.

Psychological Disorders takes its chapter arrangement from the DSM-5-TR. Each of the twelve disorder chapters follows the same sequence: the disorders, then their biological, psychological, and sociocultural influences and treatments. A student comparing two disorders finds the same sections in the same order in each chapter. Additionally, a vignette about an individual living with the disorder opens almost every section to humanize the condition, instead of simply focusing on, as Smerbeck says, “neurons.”

A DSM-5-TR Structure Built Around How Disorders Actually Relate

The two established psychopathology textbooks include diagnostic criteria inside chapters still arranged according to the DSM-IV. For example, obsessive-compulsive disorder. The DSM-IV classified it with the anxiety disorders, because people with OCD are anxious. Both books still cover it in chapter 5, under a heading that opens with anxiety.

Genetics separate OCD from the anxiety disorders, Smerbeck says. “All the anxiety disorders are genetically tied together. If you had panic disorder, other people in your family are more likely to have every anxiety disorder, but not more likely to have OCD. It’s in its own little genetic bubble.”

OCD also responds to different treatments than the anxiety disorders. Benzodiazepines such as Xanax calm an anxiety disorder and do nothing for OCD.

Chapter 6 of Psychological Disorders therefore places OCD with the disorders that share its genetics, its brain structures, and its treatments, the same conditions that older textbooks cover in a paragraph each inside an anxiety chapter.

Accessible for the Students Outside the Major

Psychological Disorders is sufficiently rigorous for psychology majors and others pursuing mental health-related careers, but is also inviting, accessible, and relevant to non-majors. It was written with the understanding that students arrive in class with a range of backgrounds and makes no presumption that every reader arrives with the same preparation.

“Psychological Disorders contains just as much information as the leading competitor,” Smerbeck says, “but that title assumes you’re totally familiar with all these ideas already. I don’t.” At least half of Smerbeck’s students in a given semester are outside the major, taking the course for a general education requirement. “It still has all the rigorous information,” he says, “but the language is more readable.”

Many of the book’s illustrations are diagrams of how concepts relate to one another, drawn for students who find dense academic English a barrier to comprehension.

“Psychology in the Community” features show how the material applies in law, education, policing, and medicine, for students who will encounter these disorders in another career. The neurodevelopmental disorders chapter, for example, explains why a person with an intellectual disability may give a false confession.

Confronting Self-Diagnosis

Every textbook for this course tells students not to diagnose themselves or the people around them. Smerbeck’s includes the typical warning and then, by his count, roughly ten “Differential Diagnosis” sections, each tracing one symptom to the conditions that can produce it.

The depressive disorders chapter highlights this method using three cases that share a symptom and differ in diagnosis. One person is sad because life is going badly. Another cries several times a day, sleeps fourteen hours, and shows no interest in other people, and also happens to be four months old. The third looks like depression until an earlier manic episode comes to light, and the diagnosis becomes bipolar disorder.

Students come to the course with a reasoning shortcut, Smerbeck says: “I see that symptom. I’ve heard of that symptom, so therefore disorder.” The Differential Diagnosis sections show why this shortcut fails.

Science and Pseudoscience, Tested One Research Design at a Time

Psychological Disorders teaches research methods on a single case: one pseudoscientific treatment, followed through published studies of increasing strength. Under the weakest designs it looks effective. Under designs that rule out more explanations, the effect disappears. A unit on spotting pseudoscience follows, an approach Smerbeck says he found in no other book.

“Science and Pseudoscience” features hold a diagnostic or treatment approach from each disorder chapter to the same standard as the research-methods unit. Most approaches do not survive it. Only one unusual treatment does.

Chapter 4 covers Freud briefly, explaining that a claim has to be falsifiable to count as a scientific hypothesis and showing why an unconscious childhood conflict cannot be tested. “If you can’t prove it wrong,” Smerbeck says, “it’s not a scientific hypothesis.”

What You’ll Find Inside

Psychological Disorders runs 17 chapters: four foundational chapters, twelve disorder chapters, and a closing chapter on careers, ethics, and law. The book fits courses titled Psychological Disorders, Psychopathology, or similar. These features run throughout:

• Expert Vocabulary call-outs for the words Smerbeck’s students misuse every year, in three kinds: everyday words with a different clinical meaning (obsession, antisocial), words with more than one clinical meaning (disorganized, rumination), and words students mix up with each other (psychopathy and psychopathology).
• Differential Diagnosis sections throughout the disorder chapters.
• Science and Pseudoscience features that weigh the evidence for a diagnostic or treatment approach tied to the chapter’s disorder.
• Psychology in the Community features that apply the material in law, education, policing, and medicine.
• Chapter-opening vignettes, written as fictional composites, for almost every disorder in the book.
• Attention to how human differences shape the experience and diagnosis of mental illness.
• Over 130 embedded streaming video links, each one checked by Smerbeck for accuracy or included as an example of inaccuracy, with a caption tying it to the passage it accompanies.
• DSM-5-TR Diagnostic Criteria Summaries in Chapters 5 through 16.
• Learning objectives, key takeaways, chapter and disorder summaries, and review exercises in every chapter.

Contemporary coverage includes the effects of COVID-19, mindfulness-based treatments, mental-health apps, novel uses of psychoactive drugs such as ketamine, and the growing reliance on telemedicine. The research is presented through fewer studies covered in greater depth, with the origin of each study explained alongside its result.

Here’s what students will gain from Psychological Disorders: The Science of Mental Health v1.0:

• The habit of asking whether a claim can be proven wrong before treating it as science.
• The reasons one symptom can point to many conditions, and why diagnosis takes training.
• Command of the clinical vocabulary, from obsession and antisocial to disorganized and rumination.
• A working sense of how psychological disorders appear in careers outside psychology, from policing to medicine.

About the Author

Alan M. Smerbeck (PhD, SUNY Buffalo) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Rochester Institute of Technology and a New York State licensed psychologist. He teaches psychological disorders, developmental psychopathology, assessment, and human sexuality. Before RIT he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Jacobs Neurological Institute in Buffalo. There he combined clinical work in neuropsychology with research on regression-based norms for neuropsychological tests and on controlled trials of drugs meant to improve cognition in multiple sclerosis patients.

Smerbeck’s research centers on psychological assessment, neuropsychology, autism spectrum disorder, and gender and sexuality, with attention to how psychological measures hold up in practice. His articles have appeared in Assessment, Multiple Sclerosis, Autism, The Clinical Neuropsychologist, and the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. His work has contributed to the development and cross-cultural validation of cognitive and neuropsychological assessment tools, including international norms and alternate forms for clinical and research use. He has also written chapters and reviews for the Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology and the Mental Measurements Yearbook.

Instructor supplements for Psychological Disorders arrive October 5, 2026: the FlatWorld Homework system, PowerPoint lectures for each chapter, a test bank, sample syllabi, and an Instructor’s Manual with lists of common student misconceptions.

Psychological Disorders costs students $41.95 for online access or $68.95 for a color print copy with online access, and the textbook is fully customizable.

Request an Exam Copy of Psychological Disorders: The Science of Mental Health v1.0 Today

We’ll take care of everything from there!