Mount Misery
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. 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.
