From the editorial head of MTV International and the author of the acclaimed first novel A&R comes a hugely entertaining black comedy about a big time NYC network television exec whose sudden firing forces him into a season in the wilderness as the head of a sorry family-run New England cable TV empire in the fictional town of New Bedlam, RI. Both wicked and big-hearted and often spit-take-level laugh-out-loud funny, New Bedlam is a wonderfully sharp, fun entertainment with real bite. Bobby Kahn fired people. It was the only bad part of a job he loved. If you asked him about it he would say the same five words each of the other 24 network vice presidents said when you asked any of them: “It comes with the turf.” That’s how they talked. They were proudly unoriginal. It’s why they made good television executives. But then one day 36-year-old network golden boy Bobby Kahn of Massapequa Long Island gets the ax himself, the scapegoat for a programming scandal. As he falls from his perch, he grasps for any branch to cling to, but the only lifeline within reach is the once-unthinkably-ignominious opportunity to relocate to the Rhode Island seaside town of New Bedlam and assume the reins of a family-run cable business with a local pipeline monopoly and three small vanity stations.

A rebellious Indian proclaiming noble ancestry and entitlement, a military lieutenant foreshadowing the coming of revolution, a blasphemous Creole embroiderer in possession of a bundle of sketches brimming with pornography. All shared one thing in common. During the late eighteenth century, they were deemed to be mad and forcefully admitted to the Hospital de San Hipolito in Mexico City, the first hospital of the New World to specialize in the care and custody of the mentally disturbed. Christina Ramos reconstructs the history of this overlooked colonial hospital from its origins in 1567 to its transformation in the eighteenth century, when it began to admit a growing number of patients transferred from the Inquisition and secular criminal courts. Drawing on the poignant voices of patients, doctors, friars, and inquisitors, Ramos treats San Hipolito as both a microcosm and a colonial laboratory of the Hispanic Enlightenment—a site where traditional Catholicism and rationalist models of madness mingled in surprising ways. She shows how the emerging ideals of order, utility, rationalism, and the public good came to reshape the institutional and medical management of madness. While the history of psychiatry's beginnings has often been told as seated in Europe, Ramos proposes an alternative history of madness's medicalization that centers colonial Mexico and places religious figures, including inquisitors, at the pioneering forefront.

A psychiatrist and award-winning documentarian sheds light on the mental-health-care crisis in the United States. When Dr. Kenneth Rosenberg trained as a psychiatrist in the late 1980s, the state mental hospitals, which had reached peak occupancy in the 1950s, were being closed at an alarming rate, with many patients having nowhere to go. There has never been a more important time for this conversation, as one in five adults--40 million Americans--experiences mental illness each year. Today, the largest mental institution in the United States is the Los Angeles County Jail, and the last refuge for many of the 20,000 mentally ill people living on the streets of Los Angeles is L.A. County Hospital. There, Dr. Rosenberg begins his chronicle of what it means to be mentally ill in America today, integrating his own moving story of how the system failed his sister, Merle, who had schizophrenia. As he says, "I have come to see that my family's tragedy, my family's shame, is America's great secret." Dr. Rosenberg gives readers an inside look at the historical, political, and economic forces that have resulted in the greatest social crisis of the twenty-first century. The culmination of a seven-year inquiry, Bedlam is not only a rallying cry for change, but also a guidebook for how we move forward with care and compassion, with resources that have never before been compiled, including legal advice, practical solutions for parents and loved ones, help finding community support, and information on therapeutic options.

Introduces the dogs of Bedlam Farm that inspire the author's books.

Bethlem Hospital is the oldest mental institution in the world, to many famously known as ' Bedlam': a chaotic madhouse that brutalised its patients. Paul Chambers explores the 800-year history of Bethlem and reveals fascinating details of its ambivalent relationship with London and its inhabitants, the life and times of the hospital's more famous patients, and the rise of a powerful reform movement to tackle the institution's notorious policies. Here the whole story of Bethlem Hospital is laid bare to a new audience, charting its well-intended beginnings to its final disgrace and reform.

Originally published: London: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

Fillmore Press was once Madder Red, a homicidal maniac and criminal overlord who ruled the city of Bedlam. Now he's been cured of his mania, and says he wants to help protect the place he once terrorized -- but what happens when the city turns on itself? No one is safe when a new killer emerges, pulling unseen strings and wreaking chaos on every corner.