The Black Monk

Tibaldo-Bongiorno, Marylou

Last Updated: Feb-20-2018

Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

As the film opens, George Anderson tells us he has been advised to treat his anxiety by going “to some island to rest.” We see him arrive by ferry in Staten Island where he has arranged to spend several weeks at the beautiful home of his father’s best friend. There, he renews his friendship with the friend’s daughter, Maggie. We discover that George, a filmmaker, dropped out of medical school, and that Maggie is now a doctor. We learn from the start that, though they have not seen each other for ten years, there is a longstanding mutual romantic attraction.

One day, while walking around the house’s lush gardens, George suddenly and improbably sees a monk. We are made to understand this is not the first time this has occurred, although at this stage George still recognizes it as a “mirage.” However, when the monk foretells a “grand brilliant future” for George and entrusts him with a divine mission, George is inspired. He becomes obsessed with attending church, and we learn he has not been sleeping. In his religious fervor he calls Maggie “disgusting” because she performs abortions.

Maggie becomes aware that something is not quite right. We learn too that George enlisted in the army and resigned under suspicious circumstances. Other details about his past are mysterious. The relationship between George and Maggie intensifies. Meanwhile, a friend warns Maggie that she has witnessed George saying peculiar things about a monk and smiling inappropriately. Finally, in Maggie’s bedroom, George has a full-fledged psychotic episode as he hallucinates the monk in front of her. She accuses him of “becoming schizophrenic,” and begs him to see a psychiatrist. He responds by accusing her of trying to drain him of his inspiration, packs up his belongings, and, despite her entreaties, leaves.

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How Can I Help? A Week in My Life as a Psychiatrist

Bryden, Pier; Goldbloom, David

Last Updated: Feb-20-2018

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Autobiography

Summary:

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.

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Letters from Limbo

Beaumont, Jeanne Marie

Last Updated: Jan-02-2018

Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

This collection of poems is a memoir in verse: it is a lyric and epistolary exploration of what it is to live in the limbo of an emotional and psychological ambiguity whose genesis lies in maternal loss, mourning, depression, and despair. The poems are arranged in three sections: “Crossing,” “Asylum Song,” and “Holding.”

The “Crossing section generally conveys to readers the nature of life in this limbo, even as it discloses some of the familial anguish that has brought about a repressive silence in the poet’s mother, as well as a depression that wreaked its havoc on the poet’s growing up. The family mysteries and the suffering of the poet prompt her to research the death of her maternal grandmother, and we learn many details of that loss in the poems of the “Asylum Song” section.

A Czech immigrant, the woman had, in the old country, lost her parents and sister, and she’d apparently abandoned—for reasons unknown—her illegitimate child. She’d married an older man and moved to the States. After giving birth to another child, she suffered a postpartum depression, for which she was placed in an asylum, and was heavily and inappropriately medicated. She died within three weeks, at age 34. Her daughter, the poet’s mother, grew up in her absence and, in turn, lost her own child—the poet’s sister—in infancy, prior to Baptism.

According to widely held beliefs of Catholics at the time, the infant would thus be relegated to Limbo for eternity: she would be barred from union with God, this is to say, though kept free from any punishment or any suffering, other than the longing for a bliss she could never attain. Such a belief would clearly exacerbate the feelings of failure and guilt that a mother might feel in losing her infant. The poet’s mother’s depression resulted, unsurprisingly, in a bewildering absence of maternal care in the poet’s life: she is stuck in her own “asylum” or Limbo—a state of emotional confinement where she maintains some vision of “beatific” maternal love, but feels it forever beyond her reach to experience. The poems of the final section, “Holding,” convey the struggle and surprising joy of inhabiting this Limbo.

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Hope and Grace: Spiritual Experiences in Severe Distress, Illness, and Dying

Renz, Monika

Last Updated: Dec-14-2017

McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Essay

Summary:

Dr. Monika Renz’s work with dying patients is unusual if not unique in the way she appropriates and applies insights from Jungian depth psychology, practices available in patients’ faith traditions, and musically guided meditation to invite and support the spiritual experiences that so often come, bidden or unbidden, near the end of life. An experienced oncologist, Dr. Renz offers carefully amassed data to support her advocacy of focused practices of spiritual care as a dimension of palliative care, but is also quite comfortable with the fact that “neither the frequency nor the visible effects of experiences of the transcendent prove that such experience is an expression of grace” because “unverifiability is intrinsic to grace.” Still, her long experience leads her to assert not only that “grace” can be a useful, practical, operative word for what professional caregivers may witness and mediate but also that affirmation and support of patients’ spiritual, religious, or transcendent experiences in the course of dying can amplify and multiply moments of grace, which manifest as sudden, deep peace in the very midst of pain, profound acceptance, openness to reconciliations, or significant awakenings from torpor that allow needed moments of closure with loved ones. Describing herself as “an open-minded religious person and a practicing Christian,” she reminds readers that God is a loanword, whose basic form in Germanic was gaudam, a neutral participle. Depending on the Indo-Germanic root, the word means “the called upon” or “the one sacrificed to . . . .” Openness to the divine in both patients and caregivers, Dr. Renz argues, can and does make end-of-life care a shared journey of discovery and offer everyone involved a valuable reminder that medicine is practiced, always, at the threshold of mystery.

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Slow Medicine: The Way of Healing

Sweet, Victoria

Last Updated: Dec-13-2017

Carter, III, Albert Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Victoria Sweet describes her training in medical school, residency, and work in various clinics and hospitals. From all of these she forms her own sense of what medical care should include: “Slow Medicine” that uses, ironically, the best aspects of today’s “Fast” medicine.

Her dramatic “Introduction: Medicine Without a Soul” describes poor—even dangerous—care given to her elderly father at a hospital. An experienced physician, she calls Hospice and saves him from a “Death Express” the hospital has “quality-assured” (pp. 6, 8).

The book continues with 16 chapters in chronological order. The first ten describe Sweet from a late ‘60s Stanford undergrad and “a sort of hippie” (p.14), next a learner of “facts” in preclinical studies at Harvard, plus the clinical rotations (including Psychiatry, Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, and electives), then an internship as a doctor and her work in various clinics and hospitals. Throughout she’s collecting skills, concepts, even philosophies (Jung, feminism, Chinese chi, value of stories). She also describes particular patients important to her learning. She dislikes “just good enough” medicine at the VA (p. 95), “unapologetic budgetarianism” (p 141), medicine that is reductive and uncaring, and futile care for dying patients.

Halfway through, we find an “Intermission: In which Fast Medicine and Slow Medicine Come Together.” With a year off, Sweet signs on as physician for a trekking group headed for Nepal. Unexpectedly, she treats an Englishman in the Himalayas. Returning home, she treats a man whose pulse is declining and rides a helicopter with him to a hospital. She realizes that she can take on the full responsibility of being a doctor, including when to use Fast medicine and when to use Slow.

The following chapters deal with the 1980s emergence of AIDS, a hand injury to Sweet (she sees herself as “a wounded healer,” p. 182), her new understanding of medicine as “A Craft, A Science, and an Art” (Chapter 12) and conflicts between medical care and economics-driven medicine (“checked boxes,” administrators, quality assurance, even outright corruption). She scorns use of the labels “health-care providers” and “health-care consumers” (p. 211) and discovers Hildegard of Bingen’s medieval vision of medicine. She works for 20 years at Laguna Honda, the topic of her earlier book God’s Hotel (2012). Chapter 16 closes the book with “A Slow Medicine Manifesto.”

Sweet pays tribute to her teachers, both in a dedication to the book, and throughout the pages: professors, preceptors, nurses—especially a series of Irish Kathleens—and patients. There are some 20 case studies of patients throughout the book, their medical dilemmas, their personalities, and Sweet’s Slow Medicine that involves creating a healing relationship with them, finding the right path for treatment, even watching and waiting.

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This Side of Doctoring: Reflections from Women in Medicine

Chin, Eliza Lo

Last Updated: Nov-09-2017

Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Biography

Summary:

This Side of Doctoring is an anthology published in 2002 about the experiences of women in medicine. While the essays span multiple centuries, most are from the past 50 years. They reflect on a multitude of stages in the authors’ personal and professional lives. In 344 pages divided into twelve sections, including "Early Pioneers," "Life in the Trenches," and "Mothering and Doctoring," the 146 authors recount - in excerpts from published memoirs, previously published and unpublished essays, poems and other writings, many of them composed solely for this collection - what it was then and what it was in 2002 to be a woman becoming a doctor in the U.S.. All but a handful of the authors are physicians or surgeons. There is a heavy representation from institutions on both coasts, especially the Northeast. Four men were invited to reflect on being married to physician wives. There is one anonymous essay concerning sexual harassment and a final essay from a mother and daughter, both physicians. Beginning with the first American female physicians in the mid-19th century, like historic ground-breakers Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary Putnam Jacobi, the anthology proceeds through the phases of medical school, residency, early and mid-careers, up to reflections from older physicians on a life spent in medicine. Many of the authors have names well known in the medical humanities, including Marcia Angell, Leon Eisenberg, Perri Klass, Danielle Ofri, Audrey Shafer, and Marjorie Spurrier Sirridge, to mention a few.

The essays and poems and letters have, as a partial listing, the following subjects: family influences in becoming a physician; professional friendships; marriage; children and their impact on a woman’s career in medicine; the decision not to have children; ill family members; illness as a physician; establishing one's sexuality as a physician; struggles with male physicians and their egos; mentors, both female and male; memorable patients (often terminal or dying); the life of a wife-physician, or mother-physician; the guilt and sacrifice that accompany such a dual life; the importance - and easy loss - of personal time or what internist Catherine Chang calls “self-care” (page 334). The anthology also touches on how women have changed the practice of medicine in various ways, prompted by the growing realization, as family practice physician Alison Moll puts it, "that I didn't have to practice in the traditional way" (page 185) The authors write about the wisdom of setting limits; training or working part-time or sharing a position with another woman; and the constant face-off with decisions, especially those not normally confronting an American man becoming a doctor.
One conclusion is evident before the reader is halfway through the book: there are many approaches to becoming a fulfilled female physician including finding one’s identity in the field. Implicit in most of the essays and writings is the lament from obstetrician-gynecologist Gayle Shore Mayer: "Where is the self ? There are pieces of me everywhere", (page 275) recalling a similar cry from Virginia Woolf's Orlando, another essentially female soul trying to find what Richard Selzer has called "The Exact Location of the Soul". Several authors discover that female physicians have unique gifts to offer their patients. As internist Rebekah Wang-Cheng writes, “I am a better physician because I am a mother, and I know because of my experiences as a physician that I am a better mother.” (page 151)

There are sections at the end devoted to a glossary for the lay reader, resources for women (as of 2002), and generous notes about the contributors (which section also serves as a useful index of each's contributions).

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This Way Madness Lies

Jay, Mike

Last Updated: Oct-17-2017

Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction — Secondary Category: Visual Arts / Visual Arts

Genre: History

Summary:

This Way Madness Lies was published in partnership with London’s Wellcome Collection for the exhibition “Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond,” which ran from September 2016 - January 2017 and was curated by Mike Jay and Bárbara Rodriguez Muñoz. It is a book that was meant to accompany the exhibition, yet which, by virtue of the substantial text and reproductions, can stand alone.

The book traces the history of treatment of the mentally ill by following the colorful story of Bethlem Royal Hospital from its antecedents in the Middle Ages up to the present. Its sway over the public imagination evidenced by its appearance in everything from Jacobean Drama to “Sweeney Todd,” Bedlam has truly attained archetypal status. An archetype, yet also a real functioning hospital. Sections of the book entitled “Madhouse,” Lunatic Asylum,” and “Mental Hospital” chronicle the facilities designed respectively during the 17th/18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and explain how they reflect changing notions of madness in each era.

The first structure was visually grand but lacked a foundation, a metaphor for what was going on inside: “a façade of care concealing a black hole of neglect” (p. 39). It became a tourist attraction along the lines of the zoo, with nothing preventing the public from gawking at and taunting the inmates. While its replacement gave the impression of being more functional, conditions proved equally squalid. On the other hand, 19th-century Europe and the United States saw asylum reforms, as well as the medicalization of madness as an “illness” and the ascent of psychiatry as a branch of medicine. Finally, in 1930, the buildings still in use in Monks Orchard, a suburb of London, were constructed.

By contrast, we learn about treatments elsewhere, most notably Geel, Belgium. There, for centuries, as an alternative to being warehoused in psychiatric hospitals, the mentally ill have been successfully boarding with townspeople.

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Songs from the Black Chair

Barber, Charles

Last Updated: Sep-08-2017

Aull, Felice

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Subtitled "A Memoir of Mental Interiors," this book is both an exploration of self and a search for reasons that led to the suicide of the author's friend, Henry, when both were of college age. But there is more. As the memoir unfolds, we learn that since childhood, the author experienced episodes of inexplicable, preoccupying, repetitive thoughts and behavior patterns--much later diagnosed as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). And finally, Barber discusses being drawn to work with mentally retarded people in a group home, and the mentally ill homeless at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.Growing up in an intellectual New England family with a tradition of sending its sons to Andover (a prestigious prep school) and Harvard, Barber was expected to continue the tradition, and so he did. At Harvard, however, Barber found himself disintegrating into obsessive thinking, unable to concentrate, near suicidal. He withdrew from Harvard, went back to his small town, hung out with his friends Henry and Nick, washed dishes in a local restaurant, took courses at the local college. Obsessive thinking continued to torment him.In desperation, he dropped out of college again, quickly finding a position as a "childcare worker" in a local group home. The author believes this step was the turning point that led eventually to effective treatment of his OCD (psychotherapy and Prozac), completion of his education, a fulfilling "career" in mental health recovery, and a happy family life. He is currently an associate of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health at Yale University School of Medicine.

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The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review

Ofri, D., et al., eds.

Last Updated: Sep-08-2017

Aull, Felice

Primary Category: Literature / Literature

Genre: Anthology (Mixed Genres)

The Story of Beautiful Girl

Simon, Rachel

Last Updated: Aug-07-2017

McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

On a stormy night in 1968 a retired, widowed schoolteacher in rural Pennsylvania opens her door to find a young couple, she white, he African American, wrapped in blankets, drenched, and silent. Letting them in changes her life. They have escaped together from a nearby mental institution most locals simply call "The School." The young woman has recently given birth. When Martha lets them in, her life changes forever. Supervisors from "the School" show up at the door, the young man escapes, and the young woman, memorably beautiful, is taken back into custody. The only words she is able to speak out of what we learn has been a years-long silence are "Hide her." Thus she leaves her newborn baby to be raised by a stranger. The remaining chapters span more than forty years in the stories of these people, linked by fate and love and the brutalities of an unreformed system that incarcerated, neglected, and not infrequently abused people who were often misdiagnosed. Homan, the young man who loved Lynnie, the beautiful girl from the institution, was deaf, not retarded. Lynnie was simply "slow," but a gifted artist who recorded many of the events of her life in drawings she shared only with the one attendant who valued and loved her. Though her pregnancy resulted from being raped by a staff member, the deaf man longs to protect her and care for the baby. Years separate them; Homan eventually learns signing; Lynnie's sister befriends her and an exposé results in the closure of the institution. Over those years Lynnie and Homan witness much cultural change in treatment of people like them who were once systematically excluded. They find social identities that once would have been entirely unavailable to them. And eventually, after literal and figurative journeys of discovery, they rediscover each other.

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