Helpful Score: 3
Despite wanting to like this book I found it hard to read and read a few lighter books in between pages. Basically, it highlights that our medical system is truly broken and so are the people who are supposed to help and are "in charge" of the rest of us helpless souls. It's House of God meets psychiatry. I loved House of God during my medical training and while I'm entrenched in cynism and live and work in our broken system I found reading about it in this author's style too depressing. And yes, I know, it's called "Mount Misery" for a reason. The author's style is very much true to House of God so I do recommend reading it as its sequel despite the middle that drags on steeped in Freud. I think there's meant to be a catharsis at the end even if that is sad and depressing too.
By the bestselling author of "The House of God," to which it is the sequel.
The blurb calls it, "a lacerating and brilliant novel of doctors and patients in a psychiatric hospital...a prestigious facility set in the rolling green hills of New England, its country club atmosphere maintained by generous corporate contributions. Dr. Roy Basch (hero of The House of God) is lucky enough to train there--only to discover doctors caught up in the circus of competing psychiatric theories, and patients who are often there for one main reason: they've got good insurance."
"For Basch [it] soon becomes a nightmare in which psychiatrists compete with one another to find the best ways to reduce human beings to blubbering drug-addled pods, or incite them to an extreme where excessive rage is the only rational response, or tie them up in Freudian knots."
"A practicing psychiatrist, Samuel Shem beings vivid authenticity and extraordinary storytelling gifts to this long-awaited sequel, to create a novel that is laugh-out-loud hilarious, terrifying, and provocative...biting irony...a wonderful sense of the absurd..."
The blurb calls it, "a lacerating and brilliant novel of doctors and patients in a psychiatric hospital...a prestigious facility set in the rolling green hills of New England, its country club atmosphere maintained by generous corporate contributions. Dr. Roy Basch (hero of The House of God) is lucky enough to train there--only to discover doctors caught up in the circus of competing psychiatric theories, and patients who are often there for one main reason: they've got good insurance."
"For Basch [it] soon becomes a nightmare in which psychiatrists compete with one another to find the best ways to reduce human beings to blubbering drug-addled pods, or incite them to an extreme where excessive rage is the only rational response, or tie them up in Freudian knots."
"A practicing psychiatrist, Samuel Shem beings vivid authenticity and extraordinary storytelling gifts to this long-awaited sequel, to create a novel that is laugh-out-loud hilarious, terrifying, and provocative...biting irony...a wonderful sense of the absurd..."
Welcome to Mt. Misery,psychiatric hospital, home of the crazed, the suicidal, the Machiavellian,and the wicked. Here lurk compulsive liars, unrepentant adulterers, sexual deviates, even a certifiable lunatic or twol And those are just the doctors. It's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for the 90s.
Didn't get around to reading it, and have too many other books to read to last me a couple years, so I am passing it on in the hopes someone else can enjoy it.
LOVED House of God though...
LOVED House of God though...
A sequel to THE HOUSE OF GOOD, good, but not quite as entertaining as the first. Overall a good read.
A fictionalized expose of life told from the perspective of a Boston area psychiatrist at a famous psychiatric facility.
"This book takes place at Mount Misery psychiatric hospital, home of the crazed, the suicidal, and the wicked." "Here lurk compulsive liars, unrepentant adulterers, sexual deviates, and even a certifiable lunatic or two." "And those are just the doctors".
A new kind of medical thriller - the inside, behind the scenes, outragous world of the psychiatric hospital. Through satirical (and just plain funny) humor we get a new understanding of mental illness and the 'healers' that are believed in.
