The narrator tracks a hypothetical week in the life and work
of a psychiatrist in a major Canadian hospital through the stories of
individual patients, some of whom were willing to be identified by name.
The book opens with “they are us” and the shocking discovery
that a patient whose life has been ruined by mental illness is a medical school
classmate.
Other patients have been followed for many years—a woman
with eating disorder, a man with bipolar disease, another with schizophrenia. A
new patient with intractable depression finally agrees to electroshock therapy,
and the first treatment is described. The painful duty of making an involuntary
admission pales in contrast to the devastation of losing a patient to suicide.
Goldbloom’s personal life, opinions, and worries are woven throughout with
frank honesty. His mother’s metastatic brain tumor sparks the associated
intimations of his own advancing age and mortality. His genuine fascination with and appreciation of
the effective modalities now available are matched by his frustration over how
they are beyond reach of far too many because of the stigma that is still
attached to mental illness and the lack of resources and political will to make
them available.
