Mount Misery: A Novel - Softcover

Shem, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 034546334X ISBN 13: 9780345463340

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2003

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

Anyone who has read Samuel Shem's previous novel, The House of God, will be familiar with Dr. Roy Basch, the protagonist of Mount Misery. When last seen, Dr. Basch was completing a grueling residency; Mount Misery finds him beginning his psychiatric training at an upscale New England mental hospital. His introduction to the myriad forms of therapy available today--everything from Freudian psychoanalysis to psychopharmacology--provides Mr. Shem with plenty of blackly humorous grist for his mill. In this hospital, apparently, you need a score card to tell the doctors from the patients.

Shem (the pseudonym of psychiatrist and playwright Dr. Stephen Bergman) delights in broad parody. He creates, for example, characters such as Dr. Heiler who gives lectures entitled "Borderline Germans and German Borderlines," or Dr. A. K. Lowell, whose devotion to Freudian analysis is so extreme that she refuses to speak to patients at all. Though the humor can be clumsy at times, Shem makes some serious points about the perils of psychotherapy in which the therapist is not above reproach.

From the Back Cover

"MOUNT MISERY is outrageously funny, a sage and important novel by a healer and a Shakespearean."
--The Boston Globe

"AN ENGROSSING READ . . . DARKLY ENTERTAINING . . .
Welcome to Mount 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 two. And those are just the doctors. . . . It's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for the '90s, with the fearsome specter of Nurse Ratched replaced by a Medusa of insurance hassles, dubious ethics, political infighting, and deliberate misdiagnoses."
--San Diego Union-Tribune

"THIS SUPERBLY INCISIVE AND WITTY SEQUEL TO SHEM'S BESTSELLING THE HOUSE OF GOD follows young Dr. Roy Basch as he proudly starts his residency at Mount Misery--only to discover . . . a carnival of fascinating secrets and terrible abuses. . . . Shem's comic energy and deep understanding of mental illness make for riveting reading."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 034546334X
• ISBN 13: 9780345463340
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 576