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Pub date September 7, 2020
ASIN B08HGTJNS2
Price $7.87 (USD), $14.99 Paperback
With startling perception and compassion, the professor of clinical psychiatry and the author and coauthor of many books, Myers takes the reader into his world as a doctor’s doctor, delving into the vulnerabilities, struggles, and traumas the physicians who suffer from mental health problems go through as they relentlessly teeter on the tightrope between terror and courage and hope and change. In descriptions of working with physicians with mental health difficulties throughout his career, he shares his personal experience of witnessing many lives lost to suicide in the absence of life-saving care, owing to the stigma associated with mental illnesses among medical professionals and the prevailing medical culture of being tough and immune to health problems. Along the way, Myers shares his own vulnerabilities, particularly his struggles with his mother’s alcoholism and the trauma of losing colleagues and patients to suicide. He also delves into his coming to terms with his sexual identity, adding a touch of intimacy to the account. In recounting the stories of his patients and colleagues, Myers casts a deeply insightful and revelatory new light onto physicians’ struggles as mental health patients. Myers’s account is deeply moving and makes for an invaluable reading not only for mental health professionals but also general physicians.
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Categories: memoir
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