Danger to Self: On the Front Line with an Er Psychiatrist (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520249844)

The psychiatric emergency room, a fast-paced combat zone with pressure to match, thrusts its medical providers into the outland of human experience where they must respond rapidly and decisively in spite of uncertainty and, very often, danger. In this lively first-person narrative, Paul R. Linde takes readers behind the scenes at an urban psychiatric emergency room, with all its chaos and pathos, where we witness mental health professionals doing their best to alleviate suffering and repair shattered lives. As he and his colleagues encounter patients who are hallucinating, drunk, catatonic, aggressive, suicidal, high on drugs, paranoid, and physically sick, Linde examines the many ethical, legal, moral, and medical issues that confront today's psychiatric providers. He describes a profession under siege from the outside--health insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, government regulators, and even "patients' rights" advocates--and from the inside--biomedical and academic psychiatrists who have forgotten to care for the patient and have instead become checklist-marking pill-peddlers. While lifting the veil on a crucial area of psychiatry that is as real as it gets, Danger to Self also injects a healthy dose of compassion into the practice of medicine and psychiatry.

Author: Paul Linde
ISBN-10: 0520249844
ISBN-13: 9780520249844
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 01/07/2010
Pages: 280
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.70w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 11/02/2009 pg. 46
Library Journal 11/15/2009 pg. 77
Booklist 12/15/2009 pg. 5
Foreword 12/17/2009