Product Description
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.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Amazon.com 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.
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 More Hilarity at "Mount Misery"
"Mount Misery" was a facility to which unruly spouses and progeny might be constrained pending divorce or other life shaping proceedings. All too true, and, after all these years, I finally figured out that Schlomo was Freud's middle name.
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If you loved The House of God, this is a must read. OR, if you do not like the mental health field, READ THIS
I loved the House of God, Shem's first novel, when it was first published. I grew up in a medical family and am never at a loss for words about the medical industry.
Nor am I at a loss for words when it comes to the mental health field, either, having good friends and relatives in that field, as well.
I did find the style of Mount Misery a bit disappointing.
However, the story it tells is very realistic. The field has made great progress in the last 20 or 30 years - this book was published only about 10 years ago, and the story it tells is as fresh as the day it was written.
Shem, of course, is a pen name for a real-life doctor author, Stephen Joseph Bergman, MD.
On a blog I found last year, Bergman wrote in an interview that mental health field critics claim that "Mount Misery" would not be true today.
Bergman retorted: Walk around McLean Hospital, and see how the patients are talking about it. And see what is going on in the mental health field.
McLean Hospital, of course, is the Harvard Pyschiatric institution in Massachusetts, and is the origin of Mount Misery.
One of the copy-editors, in fact, accidentally left a reference to McLean in the copy.
An article in the Boston Globe with Bergman at the time of the book's publication, quoted Bergman stating that these psychiatric disorders are highly treatable, and that the field is doing a terrible job.
We need more enlightened physicians and psychiatrists like Bergman.
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 Medical Error in Amazon excerpt -- is the rest any better?
Check out "look inside this book"; read the excerpt. See the glaring error -- the controversial sleep aid Halcion misspelled as Halcyon?
Why don't publishers hire competent copyeditors when preparing texts with medical content? I'm willing to bet there are more errors waiting to be found.
The story seems engaging, based on the excerpt. It's probably worth $3.50 foright a used copy, but I'm not expecting more than light entertainment.
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Bit of a change from House of God ( madcatsmom )
I read this after enthusiastically reading House of God for the second time and I must say was a little disappointed. Roy is not the same guy he was in HOG, not nearly as funny and much more depressing. Fewer crazy things happen and in general this book is much less interesting. IT is obvious the author wrote it years later as he himself has changed. Had Inot read HOG first though, I'd probably have thought this book was great!
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Further adventures of Roy Basch in the world of malpractice ( read-to-the-last-gasp )
Dr. Stephen Bergman, aka Samuel Shem, did his medical internship at a large, academic hospital in Boston after graduating from Harvard Medical School. The experiences of his internship served as the basis for his 1984 novel, THE HOUSE OF GOD, starring his alter ego, Dr. Roy Basch. In GRACEFULLY INSANE, a narrative history of McLean Hospital, the mental health facility traditionally serving Boston's upper crust, author Alex Beam notes that Bergman did his psychiatry residency at McLean. Presumably, this and subsequent experiences in the field, enabled Bergman to write MOUNT MISERY, the further adventures of Dr. Basch during his first year of training at the fictional Mount Misery psychiatric hospital.
MOUNT MISERY is billed as a dark comedy. And perhaps the first half of the book is just that. Then it becomes decidedly more serious - Bergman's indictment of what he perceives as the flaws, and indeed malpractice, within institutionalized mental health care: assembly line admissions with diagnoses designed to mine the maximum in insurance payments, over-reliance on unproven drug regimens to make patients "better", the emphasis on fund raising rather than medicine, the superegos of the "experts" that focus on appearances in medical journals and at international seminars instead of compassionate patient care, and the total hogwash (to Bergman, apparently) of Freudian analysis. Indeed, the author's criticism of institutional psychiatry evolves to a very sharp point, i.e. the sexual abuse of patients by their physician therapists, and the protection of the latter by the medical establishment. This is not the stuff of humor, dark or otherwise.
I still might have given MOUNT MISERY four stars but for several reasons. First, at 527 paperbacked pages, the book is way too long; the point could've been made in a shorter span of text. Second, once Bergman makes his case against the failures of the system, he, through the intrepid Dr. Roy, gets too preachy. (I hate being lectured in any medium designed to extract my dollars ostensibly to provide me with entertainment.) Finally, the author bends over backwards to tidy up the story's conclusion with relatively happy endings for the novel's major and minor protagonists. Indeed, the very last scenes involving Basch, his significant other Berry, and their adopted daughter Lizzy, were so warm and fuzzy as to almost induce the gag reflex. (OK, so I'm a curmudgeon and am in need of Prozac. But, give me a break!)
As I recall, I also rated THE HOUSE OF GOD at only three stars for similar reasons. I suspect MOUNT MISERY would appeal greatly to anti-establishment psychiatrists and other mental health caregivers, who would respond "Yup, been there, done that!". But, no more Samuel Shem stuff for me, thanks very much. Life is too short for well-intentioned rants that don't reveal anything new.
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