A patient whose gut symptoms don’t show up on a scope or a blood panel too often gets told there’s nothing wrong. Or worse, that it’s “all in their head,” a framing most patients experience as dismissive. Psychogastroenterology treats the gut-brain interaction itself as the thing to treat, not a last resort after the scans come back clean.
It’s a small but fast-growing subspecialty, and the three books that cover it directly take three different formats: one comprehensive handbook, one collection of practical review articles, and one written jointly for clinicians and the patients they treat. Between them they cover the theoretical grounding, the disorder-by-disorder clinical detail, and the collaborative relationship this work depends on.
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Psychogastroenterology for Adults: A Handbook for Mental Health Professionals
Edited by Simon R. Knowles, Laurie Keefer, and Antonina A. Mikocka-Walus, Routledge, 2019
This is the first book written specifically to give mental health professionals a working foundation in gastroenterology alongside the psychological treatment side. It opens with gastroenterologists themselves writing the physiology chapters, so a psychologist picking this up gets physician-vetted medical grounding rather than another psychologist’s secondhand overview on GI disease.From there it moves into the psychological concerns and conditions that show up in GI patient populations. It then covers treatment approaches, including psychopharmacology and eHealth delivery, before closing with a section on supervision and training in the field. All three editors work at the intersection of psychology and gastroenterology themselves.
It’s now several years old, so anything that’s shifted in guidelines since 2019 won’t be in here. It remains the only true foundation text for the field. Recommended first for anyone new to psychogastroenterology who needs the medical grounding as much as the psychological technique.
Psychogastroenterology, An Issue of Gastroenterology Clinics of North America
Guest edited by Laurie Keefer, Elsevier, 2022
Where the Knowles handbook lays the groundwork, this is the one to reach for on a specific population or complication. It’s structured less like a single argument and more like 14 practical clinical reviews, each written by its own specialist team. It covers
- food intolerances including celiac disease, eosinophilic esophagitis, and non-celiac gluten sensitivity
- identifying eating disorders (including ARFID) in GI patients
- sexual dysfunction and sleep disruption in GI conditions
- the transition from adolescent to adult-centred GI care
- working with trauma in the gastroenterology setting
- disparities in access to psychogastroenterology care itself.
This is reference material rather than a manual. Best for clinicians who already have the grounding and want an authoritative review on a specific population or complication they’re currently treating.
Gut Feelings: Disorders of the Gut-Brain Interaction
Douglas A. Drossman and Johannah Ruddy, DrossmanCare / The Rome Foundation, 2021
This book is deliberately written for clinicians and patients together. It runs across four parts: the history and science of disorders of gut-brain interaction (DGBI), the disorders themselves, how a patient can get the most from the doctor relationship, and guidance for the clinician on that same relationship from their side.
The book draws a hard line between illness and disease. llness is the symptom experience a patient actually has, whereas disease is a structural abnormality a test can confirm. The book argues DGBI patients get failed when clinicians treat “no disease” as proof of “no illness.” Drossman is positioned to make that case better than most, as founder of the Rome Foundation. The Rome foundation is the organization that writes the Rome Criteria, the diagnostic framework used internationally to define DGBI.
The dual audience is a strength here, not a compromise. Drossman wrote both the patient chapters and the diagnostic criteria, so clinician and patient end up working from the same material instead of two different vocabularies. It’s also self-published, but its authority comes from Drossman having written the framework itself.