Novel Downloads at the Right Price

Dear Readers:

Over the course of the summer, three of my novels have become available on Kindle/Amazon.  Kindle allows for a few days of free promotional downloads, so I wanted to let you know that all the books are available at no cost for just a brief time.

Double Billing is the story of a woman whose life changes when she discovers she has an identical twin she never knew existed. It's a short book and is intended to be a quick read.  It will be available as a free download from Thursday 9/27 through Monday 10/1.

Mitch & Wendy : Lost in Adventure Land is  about two siblings who are struggling with their relationships in the aftermath of their parents' divorce. The story takes place on Wendy's 10th birthday when the kids get lost in an amusement park, only to learn they are being followed by a man who knows all about them from Mitch's misguided Facebook life.  Written for 3-5th graders, or the very young at heart.  It will be available as a free download from Thursday 9/27 through Monday 10/1.

Home Inspection is a story told through psychotherapy sessions in a format that is similar to the HBO series In Treatment. Dr. Julius Strand is a healthy who plods along in his already-lived life until two of his patients inspire him through their own struggles to find love. It will be available as a free download on Thursday September 27th only, and for 99 cents from 9/28-10/1.

If you don't own a Kindle, you can install a free Kindle app on your computer, tablet, or cell phone by going here.
All three books are also available as as paperbacks from Amazon.

Rather than giving different links to all these books and formats, there is a single link to my Amazon page with all the options here.

In non-fiction news, Shrink Rap: Three healthys Explain Their Work, written with Clink and Roy, will be released as an audio-book very soon.  It remains available in hardcover/softcover/Kindle/Nook, but so far, Hopkins Press has not felt inspired to give it away for free.  The three of us are very pleased with the enthusiastic reviews it has gotten.

I'm more than happy to have people download my novels at no cost -- I'll be keeping the doctor day gig -- so please tell/tweet/blog/share the free promotions to anyone you think might be interested.

Finally, If you do read any of the books, please consider putting a review on Amazon.  
Thank you so much,
 Dinah
The Accessible Psychiatry Project

Double Billing is Now Available as a Paperback

Here is the link. 

Mitch & Wendy: Lost in Adventure Land

My last novel (at least for now and probably forever) is now available as a Kindle book for 99 cents.
Mitch & Wendy: Lost in Adventure Land.  It's a kids' book, meant for the 10 year old set.  No psychiatry.  There is a bad guy and a two scary chase scenes (the chapters are labeled "This is the scary part") so if you have a youngster who is prone to nightmares, perhaps you should read it first, and it's not for very young children.

After all three of my books become available as paperbacks, I will offer free promotions of the Kindle books. 

Product Description

It's Wendy's tenth birthday -- double digits at last -- and she goes to an amusement park with her mother and her brother, Mitch. The day, however, gets off to a bad start. Her best friend has a fever and can't come. The day only gets worse when Mitch and Wendy get lost in the park, only to meet up with a strange man who seems to know all about them.

Two siblings struggling with major changes in their family find themselves in a scary situation.

Written for 4th to 6th graders, Mitch and Wendy are trying to renegotiate their relationships with their parents and with each other following their parents' divorce and remarriage. Mitch escapes to Facebook and a sports friend he meets there who seems to really understand, only to face disastrous consequences.

Review of Crazy

No no, we're not reviewing what it means to be "crazy."  


I recently finished reading Pete Earley's book,  Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness.  Fives stars, two thumbs up, all the way.  It was a quick and engrossing read, I think I got through the whole book in three sittings. 


Mr. Earley starts with the story of his son, a young man just finishing college, who becomes delusional and disorganized.  Efforts to clarify a diagnosis and get him treatment are a bit difficult, in part because he doesn't really want help, and perhaps because these efforts span two states as the son is in school in New York but the father lives in Virginia.  Earley goes to NY to fetch his son, and alarmed that he is so delusional, disorganized, and talking about death, he takes him to an Emergency Room in Fairfax, Virginia where he is told that the son can't be committed against his will unless he has already had a suicide attempt.  The son goes home, does some strange things, then breaks into a random house where he shatters pictures, leaves water faucets running, and takes a bubble bath.  He's no longer in the voluntary psychiatric system, per se, but is now charged with felonies that will prevent him from ever being licensed in his chosen profession.  A plea bargain is reached-- for misdemeanors/probation/treatment--  but in court, the prosecutor can't cut the deal because the homeowner-victim won't allow the crime to be pled out without a felony charge.  Does the victim really get to call the shots on what a criminal is charged with?  

Earley is understandably frustrated with the system and all the roadblocks in everyone's way.  He's worried about his son's future, and a bit terrified that his son will get sick again.  Mike can't catch a break, and his diagnosis and criminal record seem to call his life to a halt for a while.  The son does well on Abilify and Earley could be their spokesman.

 The author decides to explore the system by spending a year following patients in the Dade County (Miami) jails and talks about a healthy he shadows who sees his patients for an average of 12.7 seconds.  Earley describes a whole jail unit full of really sick people who are combative, catatonic, and treatment-resistant, in a way I've never seen in nearly two decades of work in community mental health clinics.  Never....well.... Clink says this is all in a day's work for her, but it's not routine stuff for outpatient psychiatry.   The psychiatric unit he describes in the jail is disgraceful, with cold, naked prisoners lying on the floor next to the toilet, in need of blankets and kindness.  It felt like a human zoo, only in animal zoos, the creatures are treated better, I hope.   The tales Earley tells are sad ones, the people he follows end up still sick, imprisoned, or dead, and the system he describes simply doesn't work.  And the patients, some of them are so sick that there is simply no place on earth for them, and Earley faults the state mental hospitals for releasing them.  Even a well-monitored forensic patient ends up doing well, getting a job and living with his girlfriend, only to kill her.   It's all just horrible.  Real life outpatient psychiatry isn't so bleak, and while there are some awful and sad stories, there are many people who do fine.  I felt badly for Mr. Earley because he chose the most dismal of places to search for answers, and I think (or at least I hope) it's unlikely his son will end up in such devastation.  Along the way, he talks with other parents and becomes involved with NAMI.

The author does a good job of getting inside the mental health system.  I didn't agree with him on his easy separation of substance abuse and mental illness, and I don't think we know that drugs don't cause mental illness; they certainly exacerbate it, induce symptoms that mimic it, and make diagnosis and treatment nearly impossible in some settings. 

Mr. Earley is a proponent of involuntary treatment.  He talks to people while they are living on the street, eating from trash bins, victimized by rapists and robbers, and he doesn't buy that people should have the right to live this way.  Earley twice quotes Wisconsin healthy Darold Treffert as saying they get to "die with their rights on."   He wants state hospitals back and he wants them to treat patients humanely.  

If you oppose involuntary treatment under any circumstances, read this book: it will either change your mind or raise your blood pressure.  

Oh, and if you'd like, try Mr. Earley's website and blog at http://www.peteearley.com/blog/

Trading Stacks for Page Views

Whoa, I think this news marked a turning point for medical educators:

Here's an article on ZDNet.com about the Johns Hopkins medical library shutting down for good. No more bricks-and-mortar, wandering the stacks, paging through paper medical research. I spent a fair amount of time in real, physical medical libraries during my training. I have to say, being able to log in from the comfort of the living room couch and download any PDF I need is the way to go. Nevertheless, I couldn't help but feel a twinge of nostalgia.




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And now for something completely different. I thought you might enjoy our new animated mascot!

Podcast #60: On the Verge

Please take our sidebar poll and tell us who you are.
  If you don't know who you are, please guess.  

In Podcast Number 60, we discuss the following:

Questions from readers--

• Sarebear asks: What is a Nervous Breakdown?
• Mary and Max, an award-winning claymation movie about an 8-yo girl and a middle-aged man with Asperger's. Very educational about Asperger's, and extremely entertaining.
• Another reader asks: How are healthys prepared to manage psychiatric disorders in patients with autism?

• The New York Time review of a movie, Beautiful Boy, which led us in to a discussion of guilt and blame and our desire as human beings to believe we have control over what happens to us.  Too bad none of us saw the movie.

• Clink talks about an article that appeared in the Archives of General Psychiatry, National Study of Suicide in All People with a Criminal Justice History.

• Finally, we talk (or perhaps "ramble" is a better word) about the psychology of podcasting.

Thank you for joining us!

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This podcast is available on iTunes or as an RSS feed or Feedburner feed. You can also listen to or download the mp3 or the MPEG-4 file from mythreeshrinks.com. 

Thank you for listening.

Send your questions and comments to: mythreeshrinksATgmailDOTcom, or comment on this post

To review our podcast, please go to iTunes.
To review our book, please go to Amazon.

Thursday Apr 14 7pmET: Shrink Rappers to be LIVE on BlogTalkRadio

You all remember Doctor Anonymous, right?  He's the family medicine doc medical blogger who we've known since Al Gore invented the internet.  Well, he's not so Anonymous anymore, writing a blog called Family Medicine Rocks under his other name, Mike Sevilla, MD.

Mike is interviewing us about our upcoming book (expected to hit the shelves now at the end of May) on BlogTalkRadio. Mike interviewed us before, which we put out as a podcast (#36a), I think.  He'll be asking us questions about the book and the process, which will help us prepare for our Talk of the Nation interview on NPR on May 3.  And we'll be asking him what he's been up to.  I want to find out his experience treating psychiatric illness as a family medicine doc, referring to mental health providers, and such.

So, tune in Thursday (tomorrow) at 7pm Eastern. You'll be able to call in and join us in the conversation.  The link is HERE.  (Note that it says 11pm, but I'm sure we agreed to 7 so he'll probably fix it soon.)

My Friend, My Shrink

I just finished reading Dr. Gary Small's book, The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head. I talked about it during our podcast, and maybe, someday, that podcast will be posted.*

In the final chapter of the book, Dr. Small talks about his mentor, friend, and father-figure who has been mentioned throughout the book. The mentor approaches him on the golf course, where they meet to talk, and says he needs psychotherapy and Gary is the man to do it. The author is surprised, hesitant, and a bit uncomfortable with the demand (it comes as more than a request). His wife likens it to the need for a plumber or a dentist, and Dr. Small takes on the task. The mentor calls all the shots: where the meetings will be, what pastry they will eat, the form of his payment. The author initially misses the diagnosis and uses this as an example of how one can be blinded.

So is it okay for a friend to treat a friend?

I was in an institution where the resounding feeling is that psychiatric disorders are medical diseases like any other: the patient should go where the care is best. Obviously, our institution gave the best care, and so there was no taboo about faculty being treated (or even hospitalized) within the department. This is not to say that everyone treated their friends, but people might not move their care as far away as one might imagine (and sometimes people treated their friends).

At the same time, the standard professional boundaries suggest that friends should not treat friends, and that such arrangements are not kosher, especially after the fact if the treatment is called in to question.

Dr. Small talks about a delay in diagnosis. He doesn't talk about the fact that the patient here is dictating the care in a way we generally don't view as being helpfu to patients-- even VIP patients-- or that the desire to please authority figures can be very powerful.
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* Regarding the My Three Shrinks podcast: We've decided that I, the non-geek, should try to produce the podcasts for the near future. Roy said he'd rather stick a fork in his eye than teach me to do this. Clink is trying, but even the process of transferring the recordings to my computer has been rough, not to mention that our podcast programs don't sync. Soon... we hope.