Mount Misery

A Novel

By: Samuel Shem

Narrated by: Sean Runnette

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.

Not as good as The House Of God

For those eager to find a continuation of Shem’s brilliant House of God, you will and won’t encounter it in Mount Misery. Set about twenty years after the original, we find Roy Basch struggling his way through a psychiatric residency. As with The House of God, Shem fills this sequel with countless absurdities that unfortunately are indeed true (I say this as an intensivist who is well-versed in Medicine and the rigors of Psychiatry). I enjoyed this book though it was not as fresh as the original. When it gets serious, it gets brutally serious. I think that part of my frustration with this novel is that I don’t really like the character of Roy Basch. He is basically a shit of a person who bumbles his way through rotations and women not recognizing the good that he has in his life partner Berry until after he has engaged in several other frivolous relationships. Despite my frustrations with Mount Misery, I still recommend it to those who are well-versed in Medicine and Psychiatry and where the latter fits in with the former. I think that readers who are not physicians will have a very hard time with the book’s sarcasm. They will also not likely be too sympathetic to Roy.

Wonderful!

Don’t miss this book. Extraordinary if you’re willing to look deep inside yourself and be with others.