Weekends at Bellevue Book

I will start by saying that this book was a crashing bore. If you go into the reading of this book to learn about mental illnesses, you will be disappointed. If you go into it to take a journey of self discovery by the author, you will be disappointed. I listened to it on CD and several times forced myself not to skip whole sections. For example, the litany of morning report - who came into the ED last night, what their diagnosis is and the circumstances of their admission to Bellevue. Over and over and over. Who cares? And listening to the me, me, me, me self absorption and self referential meanderings of this author was like listening to a dial tone.
In "Weekends at Bellevue" the reader is fed a titillating smorgasbord of modern psychiatry -- narcissism, toxic relationship issues, ambiguity, conflict, and sexual obsession that seems an awful lot like what they used to call nymphomania. And most of it is about the author, psychiatrist Julie Holland who worked the weekend overnight shift at Bellevue from 1996 to 2005.
I have been in Holland's situation and felt frustrated beyond reason with the tragedy of mental illnesses and the criminal inability of the U.S. health care system (and I use that word loosely) to actually care for those suffering from them. But, the big difference is that I did not lose my own "hair trigger empathy response" and when I felt walls going up, I switched over to a different venue in psych. Not so with Holland.
Actually, I read the plethora of negative reviews on this book, and I was determined to cut this woman a break. Throughout the book I kept hoping for something more than a wallowing and self indulgent recital of every thought this woman ever had. Stories and memoirs about physicians can illuminate the beauty and strength of the human spirit and can take us on a journey of self exploration and growth. Cutting for Stone and My Own Country by Abraham Verghese come to mind. But Holland is no Verghese and her memoir exploits a voyeuristic impulse to consume other people's suffering for entertainment.
A dark humor and what R.J. Lifton calls "psychological doubling" is a necessary defense in emergency work, but steadily engaging in it will take hold of a professional and strip them of their humanity. Parenthetically, Lifton also speaks to this. Holland should have spared herself all the dollars and hours in therapy and read her fellow psychiatrist's articles and books on the subject. She would have seen herself in them - but this is a woman who has little insight or and is probably too arrogant to be able to engage in this kind of self reflection.
I agreed with most of the negative reviews on Amazon and G.R. but was surprised that no one mentioned that no self respecting psychiatrist in this day and age should constantly refer to people who are unfortunate to have an illness by their illness. Although professionals often use a jargon as a shorthand and call people with bipolar disorder "bipolar" or people with schizophrenia "schizophrenics" it has been hammered by the advocacy community into all our heads that people are not their illnesses. Once we think of them this way, they lose their status as human beings. This constant reference to "schizophrenics" and "bipolar" and "druggies" annoyed me to no end and also served as one more piece of evidence that this woman fails to see anything beyond herself and her own issues. Another piece of evidence when speaking to a person with psychosis, she tells us, is "a lot like talking to a dumb kid, only it's more pathetic." Pathetic. Does anyone want to be thought of as pathetic by their physician?
In a nutshell this book sets out to convey the toll that the devastating phenomenon that is mental illness takes on both patients and the professionals who care for them, but Dr. Holland's issues clearly began long before she was responsible for other people's mental health. She is also clearly engaged with only one patient - herself - she is just the kind of psychiatric professional that makes the rest of us cringe when we find them in the profession.
Don't bother to spend your money on this book. I am glad I got it from the library.
Oh, a final thing, the audio-book has a photo of a goofy looking woman in surgical scrubs, cap, and mask. Did the publishers even go outside their heads to see what shrinks wear? They certainly do not dress as though they are going into the surgical suite.