Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Over the past several decades, psychiatry has undergone radical changes. After its midcentury heyday, psychoanalysis gave way to a worldview guided by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which precisely defined mental disorders and their treatments; more recently, this too has been displaced by a model inspired by neuroscience. Each of these three dominant models overturned the previous era’s assumptions, methods, treatment options, and goals. Each has its own definitions of health and disease, its own concepts of the mind. And each has offered clinicians and patients new possibilities as well as pitfalls. The Couch, the Clinic, and the Scanner is an insightful first-person account of psychiatry’s evolution. David Hellerstein—a psychiatrist who has practiced in New York City since the early 1980s, working with patients, doing research, and helping run clinics and hospitals—provides a window into how the profession has transformed. In vivid stories and essays, he explores the lived experience of psychiatric work and the daunting challenges of healing the mind amid ever-changing theoretical models. Recounting his intellectual, clinical, and personal adventures, Hellerstein finds unexpected poetry in hallways and waiting rooms; encounters with patients who are by turns baffling, frustrating, and inspiring; and the advances of science. Drawing on narrative-medicine approaches, The Couch, the Clinic, and the Scanner offers a perceptive and eloquent portrayal of the practice of psychiatry as it has struggled to define and redefine itself.
Synopsis of Stone Babies A young doctor in New York City, Dr. Jay Sones has just finished training as an obstetrician and infertility specialist. For over a decade he has been working at Manhattan Medical Center, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side, first as a medical student, then as an obstetrics resident, then as an Infertility Fellow, treating women with fertility problems and doing ground-breaking research with his mentor, the world-renowned Dr. Leon Witt. After years of sleepless nights in which Jay has delivered innumerable babies and treated almost every type of difficult pregnancy, he has become an expert obstetrician-gynecologist. In several years of Infertility Fellowship, working with the temperamental and brilliant Dr. Witt, Jay has survived a different kind of apprenticeship, becoming a medical scientist who can participate in the amazing advances of infertility research. After years of sacrifices--financial and emotional--Jay is ready for the rewards of "real life." He prepares to open up a private practice in Manhattan in partnership with his friend and colleague from the hospital, Dr. Alli Daniel. For a while it looks like life will be perfect--an Upper East Side practice, the opportunity to continue doing research with Dr. Witt. And, most of all, some time for a personal life, for love and romance, with his sometimes-girlfriend, Janine Stern. Janine, who is elegant and intriguing and quite successful (she runs a large consulting firm), has her eye on Jay's future, though he is content to remain in the present--dinners at elegant restaurants, nights at her East End Avenue penthouse, leisurely Sunday brunches together after running the Reservoir in Central Park, not to mention occasional romantic weekend in her Connecticut country house. * Just as Jay's new life begins, though, disaster strikes. One weekend afternoon, while working in the research lab at Manhattan Medical Center, Jay's partner, Dr. Alli Daniel, is assaulted and nearly killed. Then Jay's application for Admitting Privileges at Manhattan Medical Center (which will allow him to deliver babies and treat patients there) is denied. And out of nowhere, he is caught up in a vicious malpractice suit. To make ends meet, Dr. Sones takes jobs in New Yorks dreaded outer boroughs. There is The Lamb, a beleaguered hospital in the South Bronx, and Brooklyn Womans Care, or BWC, a storefront clinic in the slums of Brooklyn. At The Lamb, he delivers baby after baby, enduring brownouts and shootouts, and squalid operating rooms and thirteen-year-old mothers having their second or third babies. And in Brooklyn, Jay sees a different side of urban medicine, working in the front lines in what can only euphemistically be described as a "clinic" but is really the private preserve for Eddie Polito, better known for his prior professions of refuse removal and stolen car redistribution. Nonetheless, The Lamb and BWC pay the bills. And when your fancy Park Avenue practice is bleeding money, and when your lawyer is running a $250 per hour meter with no end of billable hours in sight, cash is king. And so Jay Sones's dreams of a glamorous medical existence rapidly fade into oblivion. There is more, though: As he runs from one patient to the next, and from the squalor of urban poverty to the glamorous world of his wealthy girlfriend, Jay's suspicions grow that the three disastrous events are related--that there is a connection between Alli's attack and the malpractice suit and the way in which his privileges were denied at Manhattan Medical Center. Then things get nasty. Jay becomes persona non grata at Manhattan Medical Center, banished from even setting foot in the Infertility Center. Dr. Witt turns from chilly politeness to open hostility. And then Jay himself is sucker-punched, unexpectedly caught up in the inc
In this poignant, deeply moving book, Dr. David Hellerstein traces five generations of American medicine -- from the Civil War to the present day -- as seen through the eyes of his unforgettable family.
Maybe you are one of the more than 45 million people in the United States who is currently struggling with depression. Maybe anxiety keeps you from truly enjoying your job, your relationships, your life. Maybe every change you have tried to make seems to have failed and you are beginning to feel as if change is simply not possible. Author David J. Hellerstein uses the term New Neuropsychiatry to refer to a dramatically different approach to help people who have depression and anxiety disorders. Unlike Old Psychiatry, which often focused on early life issues, the New Neuropsychiatry focuses on improving present-day life and on achieving long-term remission of symptoms. Heal Your Brain combines the advances of neuroscience and medicine with the art of the storyteller to show how the New Neuropsychiatry can alter the course of your life. Dr. Hellerstein, a psychiatrist at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, puts this new form of psychiatry to the test. Depression and anxiety disorders damage the brain, but as Dr. Hellerstein explains, the right treatment can change the patterns of brain activity, brain cell connections, and even the brain’s anatomy. To illustrate, he relates the stories of people as they travel through various phases of New Neuropsychiatry treatment, from evaluation to therapy to remission, and illustrates how this approach can help you progress through each phase as well. The book’s compelling narrative demonstrates that, in many cases, it is possible to achieve a stable recovery and return to—or even experience for the first time—a life free of crippling anxiety and depression.
The book’s compelling narrative demonstrates that, in many cases, it is possible to achieve a stable recovery and return to—or even experience for the first time—a life free of crippling anxiety and depression.
These first-person accounts of a doctor's early training illuminate his feelings of fear and anger, his role as odds player with an advancing science, and his personal interactions with patients, colleagues, and his own family
The study of proteomics provides researchers with a better understanding of disease and physiological processes in animals. Methods in Animal Proteomics will provide animal scientists and veterinarians currently researching these topics in domestic animals a firm foundation in the basics of proteomics methodology, while also reviewing important advances that will be of interest to established researchers in the field. Chapters will provide practical information on a range of topics including protein identification and separation, bioinformatics, and applications to disease and reproduction research. This text will be written by leading international proteomics experts and essential for researchers in the fields of animal biology and veterinary medicine.
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