From the Laws of Mount Misery: There are no laws in psychiatry. 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. From the Laws of Mount Misery: Your colleagues will hurt you more than your patients. 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. From the Laws of Mount Misery: Psychiatrists specialize in their defects. 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. From the Laws of Mount Misery: In psychiatry, first comes treatment, then comes diagnosis. 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.

Why We Suffer is the amazing story of what mainstream psychology has failed to teach the world. The author, Peter Michaelson, is a former journalist and science writer who has been in private practice as a psychotherapist for more than 25 years. This book reveals how we hide from our awareness--through resistance, denial, and psychological defenses--the existence of a hidden flaw in our psyche. This unconscious, mental-emotional processing dysfunction is a grave danger to each of us personally and to all of us collectively. Through our defense system, we cover up awareness of this inner dysfunction.This flaw in human nature produces irrationality, self-defeat, and negative emotions. It gets the best of us only when we fail to become conscious of it. When we expose it, we begin to remedy the problem. When this flaw no longer contaminates our inner life, we feel, just for starters, our goodness and our value more fully, and we're more respectful of the goodness and value of others.Most of us have problems or challenges we would like to resolve. Collectively, we also have challenging national and worldwide problems that need to be corrected. We may not be up to these challenges if we're not conscious enough of our inner dynamics. Handicapped by a lack of self-knowledge, how can we trust ourselves to avoid conflict and self-defeat? We will fail repeatedly to learn from history.A lot of good ideas are in circulation for making ourselves and the world a better place. But good ideas aren't enough in themselves. This hidden flaw can keep good ideas from being acted on because it compels us, at best, to be indecisive, confused, and prone to dissension. At worst, it produces self-defeat and self-destruction. This negative effect consistently trumps our good ideas and best intentions.This book reveals essential knowledge that humankind has been reluctant to accept. This knowledge involves our hidden, unconscious collusion in producing self-defeating emotions and behaviors. The key to taking charge of our life involves seeing more clearly than ever how our emotional nature is processed within us.

Praise for the print edition:" ... no other reference work on American fiction brings together such an array of authors and texts as this.

For Michael Fortnam, a painful level of isolation, emptiness, and confusion had become normal. Severe depression, delusions, and manic episodes tore through his life in ways that people around him couldn’t see. Finally, a crisis brought his suffering to the surface, and a shocking arrest led to a lengthy stay in a psychiatric hospital. It was there that he began to accept that many of his thoughts were delusional. Distorted Mind describes the experience of depression, hallucinations, and mania in a straightforward, accessible way that readers will easily empathize with and understand. Michael describes how medication and therapy have allowed him to emerge from mental illness to live a more promising and meaningful life. He is now in a stable relationship, holds a job, and has not been hospitalized since the year 2000. Michael’s story gives important encouragement to those who are suffering from mental illness or in a stage of treatment where hope is not yet clear. It also provides valuable information to family, friends, and treatment professionals about what it’s like to experience a mental health crisis, and the ways in which caring people can provide support for a successful outcome.

Originally published in 1989. In this interdisciplinary study, Dr Levin offers an account of personal growth and self-fulfilment based on the development of our capacity for listening. This book should be of interest to advanced students of critical theory, psychology, cultural studies, ethics, continental philosophy, ontology, metaphysics.

This book reveals the strain of a moment in American cultural history that led several remarkable writers -- Emerson, Warner, and Melville -- to render loss in innovative ways. These three key writers rejected Calvinist and sentimental models of bereavement, creating instead the compensations of a mature American literature.