Mount Misery

(Paperback)

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Description

A blackly comic tour de force which does for psychiatrists what Catch-22 did for war. Welcome to Mount Misery psychiatric hospital, home of the crazed, the suicidal, the Machiavellian and the wicked. And that's just the doctors. For Dr Roy Basch, proudly starting his residency there, it is a bewildering and nightmarish experience. The different disciplines appear to compete with one another to find the best ways to reduce the patients to gibbering wrecks. As he immerses himself in the system, he discovers that the process of treating the patients has less to do with making them better and more with maintaining the flow of insurance company money. Basch believes that he can find meaning here, but in an enclosed world which has lost its head, he soon finds that survival, not meaning, is the most valuable lesson he will learn. Mount Misery is hilarious, provocative and terrifying. Filled with biting irony and a wonderful sense of the absurd, it is an absorbing and authentic report from within the crumbling fortress of psychiatry and tells you everything you'll never learn in therapy. And it's a hell of a sight funnier too.

Reviews

'An engrossing read...darkly entertaining...One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest for the 90s' * San Diego Union Tribune *
'Provocative, complex and disturbing...[Shem] writes with enough passion that we care and enough wisdom that we are able to understand' * American Oxonian *
'Outrageously funny...a sage and important book' * The Boston Globe *

Author Bio

Samuel Shem (Stephen Bergman M.D.) graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and earned a Ph.D in physiology from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He graduated from Harvard Medical School. He is the author of the novels The House of God, Mount Misery and Fine, and seven plays, including, with Janet Surrey, Bill W. and Dr. Bob. He is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the Stone Centre, Wellesley College. He lives near Boston with his wife and daughter.