Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  I.

  There are no laws in psychiatry.

  II.

  Psychiatrists specialize in their defects.

  III.

  At a psychiatric emergency, the first procedure is to check your own mental status.

  IV.

  The patient is not the only one with the disease, or without it.

  V.

  In psychiatry, first comes treatment, then comes diagnosis.

  VI.

  The worst psychiatrists charge the most, and world experts are the worst.

  VII.

  Medical school is a liability in becoming a psychotherapist.

  VIII.

  Your colleagues will hurt you more than your patients.

  IX.

  You can learn everything about a person by the way he or she plays a sport.

  X.

  Medical patients don’t take their medication fifty percent of the time, and psychiatric patients don’t take their medication much at all.

  XI.

  Therapy is part of life, and vice versa.

  XII.

  Healing in psychotherapy has nothing to do with psychology; connection, not self, heals.

  XIII.

  The delivery of psychiatric care is to know as little as possible, and to understand as much as possible, about living through sorrow with others.

  About the Author

  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 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 with his wife and five-year-old daughter near Boston.

  Also by Samuel Shem

  THE HOUSE OF GOD

  and published by Black Swan

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  www.transworldbooks.co.uk

  MOUNT MISERY

  A BLACK SWAN BOOK : 9780552776226

  Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781409091493

  First publication in Great Britain

  Black Swan edition published 1999

  Copyright © Samuel Shem 1997

  The right of Samuel Shem to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: excerpt from ‘The Latest Freed Man’ from Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1942 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Simon & Schuster and A.P. Watt Ltd., on behalf of Michael Yeats: excerpt from ‘Vacillation’ from The Poems of W.B. Yeats: A New Edition edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company. Copyright renewed © 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.

  All the characters and places in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, and to any institutions is purely coincidental.

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