MOUNT MISERY

From the Laws of Mount Misery:u003cbru003e u003cbru003e There are no laws in psychiatry.u003cbru003e u003cbru003e Now, from the author of the riotous, moving, bestselling classic, The House of God, comes a lacerating and brilliant novel of doctors and patients in a psychiatric hospital. Mount Misery is 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.u003cbru003e u003cbru003e u003cbru003e u003cbru003e From the Laws of Mount Misery:u003cbru003e u003cbru003e Your colleagues will hurt you more than your patients.u003cbru003e u003cbru003e On rounds at Mount Misery, it's not always easy for Basch to tell the patients from the doctors: Errol Cabot, the drug cowboy whose practice provides him with guinea pigs for his imaginative prescription cocktails . . . Blair Heiler, the world expert on borderlines (a diagnosis that applies to just about everybody) . . . A. K. Lowell, née Aliyah K. Lowenschteiner, whose Freudian analytic technique is so razor sharp it prohibits her from actually speaking to patients . . . And Schlomo Dove, the loony, outlandish shrink accused of having sex with a beautiful, well-to-do female patient.u003cbru003e u003cbru003e u003cbru003e u003cbru003e From the Laws of Mount Misery:u003cbru003e u003cbru003e Psychiatrists specialize in their defects.u003cbru003e u003cbru003e For Basch the practice of psychiatry 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. And all the while, the doctors seem less interested in their patients' mental health than in a host of other things *managed care insurance money, drug company research grants and kickbacks, and their own professional advancement.u003cbru003e u003cbru003e u003cbru003e u003cbru003e From the Laws of Mount Misery:u003cbru003e u003cbru003e In psychiatry, first comes treatment, then comes diagnosis.u003cbru003e u003cbru003e What The House of God did for doctoring the body, Mount Misery does for doctoring the mind. A practicing psychiatrist, Samuel Shem brings vivid authenticity and extraordinary storytelling gifts to this long-awaited sequel, to create a novel that is laugh-out-loud hilarious, terrifying, and provocative. Filled with biting irony and a wonderful sense of the absurd, Mount Misery tells you everything you'll never learn in therapy. And it's a hell of a lot funnier.u003cbru003e u003cbru003e u003cbru003e u003ciu003eFrom the Hardcover edition.u003c/iu003e