Under Observation: Life Inside the McLean Psychiatric Hospital

By Lisa Berger and Alexander Vuckovic

Book Overview

Behind closed doors at one of the country's premier psychiatric hospitals. Keisha is a delusional pregnant woman who believes her unborn child is the messiah. David is a suicidal compulsive foot washer who undergoes electroshock therapy. Julie has multiple personality disorder, a controversial illness that some doctors believe doesn't really exist. Combining the case histories and personal stories of these and several other patients with information about mental illness, psychiatric research, treatment theory, and government and insurance regulations, veteran writer Lisa Berger and psychopharmacologist Alexander Vuckovic, MD, chronicle the work of the doctors and staff at McLean Hospital and draw a picture of life at psychiatric institutions across the country. Informative, powerful, important, and moving, Under Observation pushes beyond stereotypes about mental illness and its treatment to portray the alternatively dismaying and uplifting truth. "Fascinating, complex, and important."--Joanne Greenberg, author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140251472
• ISBN13: 9780140251470
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.7" x 0.8" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

If your into mental health

This is a book that I find hard to put down. Although the cases are tweeked for privacy reasons, it is different from the mental health setting in today's society. This book is not for clinical purposes, but to get an understanding of mental health at McLean psychiatric hospital.