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Title details for Mount Misery by Samuel Shem - Available

Mount Misery

A Novel

by Samuel Shem
ebook
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From the Laws of Mount Misery:
There are no laws in psychiatry.
Now, from the author of the riotous, moving, bestselling classic, The House of God, comes a lacerating and brilliant novel of doctors and patients in a psychiatric hospital. Mount Misery is a prestigious facility set in the rolling green hills of New England, its country club atmosphere maintained by generous corporate contributions. Dr. Roy Basch (hero of The House of God) is lucky enough to train there *only to discover doctors caught up in the circus of competing psychiatric theories, and patients who are often there for one main reason: they've got good insurance.
From the Laws of Mount Misery:
Your colleagues will hurt you more than your patients.
On rounds at Mount Misery, it's not always easy for Basch to tell the patients from the doctors: Errol Cabot, the drug cowboy whose practice provides him with guinea pigs for his imaginative prescription cocktails . . . Blair Heiler, the world expert on borderlines (a diagnosis that applies to just about everybody) . . . A. K. Lowell, née Aliyah K. Lowenschteiner, whose Freudian analytic technique is so razor sharp it prohibits her from actually speaking to patients . . . And Schlomo Dove, the loony, outlandish shrink accused of having sex with a beautiful, well-to-do female patient.
From the Laws of Mount Misery:
Psychiatrists specialize in their defects.
For Basch the practice of psychiatry soon becomes a nightmare in which psychiatrists compete with one another to find the best ways to reduce human beings to blubbering drug-addled pods, or incite them to an extreme where excessive rage is the only rational response, or tie them up in Freudian knots. And all the while, the doctors seem less interested in their patients' mental health than in a host of other things *managed care insurance money, drug company research grants and kickbacks, and their own professional advancement.
From the Laws of Mount Misery:
In psychiatry, first comes treatment, then comes diagnosis.
What The House of God did for doctoring the body, Mount Misery does for doctoring the mind. A practicing psychiatrist, Samuel Shem brings vivid authenticity and extraordinary storytelling gifts to this long-awaited sequel, to create a novel that is laugh-out-loud hilarious, terrifying, and provocative. Filled with biting irony and a wonderful sense of the absurd, Mount Misery tells you everything you'll never learn in therapy. And it's a hell of a lot funnier.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 29, 2012

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780307815613

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780307815613
      • File size: 2205 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 2, 1997
      Combining his experience as a psychiatrist with the literary toolbox of absurdist comedy, Shem sets in motion a carnival of fascinating secrets and terrible abuses of authority on the New England campus of Mount Misery psychiatric hospital, where the doctors are clearly much sicker than the patients. This superbly incisive and witty sequel to Shem's bestselling The House of God follows young Dr. Roy Basch as he proudly starts his residency at prestigious Mount Misery--only to discover a maze of pharmaceutical, emotional and physical tortures ranging from hucksterism to rape. The tension rises as Basch reels through one terrifying, brainwashing rotation after another, with each rotation supervisor insisting that Basch apply a different technique to his patients, who ironically struggle to weather their doctor's inexplicable mood swings and changes in approach. If the tone is light, Shem is nevertheless serious about his targets. Insurance companies and HMOs come in for a beating, whether they're consigning suicidal patients to voice-mail jail or dictating cost-cutting (and brain-damaging) pharmaceutical treatment. Craven doctors lust after drug-company kickbacks, and a few perverted practitioners of Freudian psychoanalysis lust after everything and everyone. Even when the book weakens a little (as in the too tidy ending), Shem's comic energy and deep understanding of mental illness make for riveting reading. Major ad/promo; author tour. (Mar.) FYI: Samuel Shem is the pen name of Stephen Bergman, who is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and maintains a private psychiatric practice.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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