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Basic Books
October 2009
On Sale: October 6, 2009
320 pages
ISBN: 0553807668
EAN: 9780553807660
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Julie Holland thought she knew what crazy was.
Then she came to Bellevue. New York City’s Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public
hospital in the United States, has a tradition of “serving
the underserved” that dates back to 1736. For nine eventful
years, Dr. Holland was the weekend physician in charge of
Bellevue’s psychiatric emergency room, a one-woman front
line charged with assessing and treating some of the city’s
most vulnerable and troubled citizens, its forgotten and
forsaken—and its criminally insane. Deciding who gets locked
up and who gets talked down would be an awesome
responsibility for most people. For Julie Holland, it was
just another day at the office. In an absorbing memoir laced with humor, Holland provides an
unvarnished look at life in the psych ER, recounting stories
from her vast case files that are alternately terrifying,
tragically comic, and profoundly moving: the serial killer,
the naked man barking like a dog in Times Square, the
schizophrenic begging for an injection of club soda to quiet
the voices in his head, the subway conductor who watched a
young woman pushed into the path of his train. As Holland
comes to understand, the degree to which someone can lose
his or her mind is infinite, and each patient’s pain leaves
a mark on her as well—as does the cancer battle of a fellow
doctor who is both her best friend and her most trusted mentor. Writing with uncommon candor about her life both inside and
outside the hospital—her professional struggles, personal
relationships, and the therapy sessions that help her crack
the hard shell she’s formed to keep the pain at bay—Holland
supplies not only a page-turner with all the fast-paced
immediacy of a TV medical drama but also a fascinating
glimpse into the inner lives of doctors who struggle to
maintain perspective in a world where sanity is in the eye
of the beholder.
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