Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER

I was interested in this book as a graduate student in mental health counseling and I loved it. She has a tough approach to these patients but it is her own personal way and appropriate for who she is dealing with. She is not trying to give readers an inside look into all of Bellevue or CPEP but rather her own personal experiences and how she handled situations. It gave me insight into her life as a psych ER doctor and how she uses humor to work with the most difficult patients and prevent a quick burnout. It was an easy read and while it might not be for everyone (particularly those who have people close to them who have been hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital), it was an amazing look into the craziness of Bellevue and how one doctor stayed sane during it all with her own personal approach.

I like this book (almost finished). I have been trying to decide if I like this doctor or not. I think I do. She is honest about her own failings which makes me tend to like her. I too know the ambivalenceand guilt of not wanting to see a friend or family member in their decline. Before reading this I thought I was the only one. I am surprised to read other's reviews claiming that this doctor is self-absorbed. Why is it that a woman who tells a personal and meaningful story is called self-absorbed, but when men who are alcoholics and drug addicts write their memoirs they are called "honest" and "gutsy" and wind up on the best-seller list? (And I personally find these stories tedious and boring at this point.) A good book, and a good doctor.

I was mesmerized by Julie Holland's book from start to finish. Seldom do you find a professional willing to talk about her/his professional life, warts and all. As a psychiatric nurse who has worked running a suicide prevention and crisis center and taught mental health to BSN students, I can relate exactly to the experiences she shares, from the experiences themselves to the burn-out always lurking around the corner. Medical Professionals who work in crisis situations always have seemingly non-politically correct ways of verbally coping with all the difficult and deadly circumstances they run up against every day. It is only shocking to those on the outside. It is just a way of keeping our own sanity and keeping cumulative post traumatic stress disorder at bay. Trust me when I tell you that these stories and non-PC comments do not translate to the bridge table or a church social. In my experience things are mostly said in love and respect because those in the trenches would do ANYTHING to save a patient!

I found my reactions to Julie Holland mixed. She is the type of doctor and co-worker I like, funny, efficent, knowledgeable and coolheaded in a crisis and yet, in many ways, she is exactly what i hate in medicne - egotistical, lacking empathy for her patients and pocessing a mean streak bordering on sadistic(her own term in case you think I am overreaching) The protrait her is realistic and yet unsettling. The human mind is fragile and no two people respond the same to treatement or drugs and herein lies a double story of a doctor using drugs to control patients in the Emergency Room and using drugs more than therapy to help her private practice patients because it is what she prefers and what her clients expect. Interestingly when she seeks professional help for herself it is with a therapist and not with medication which stood in start contract to the care provided her private practice patients. In fairness she only share a little of her private practice so this may be a somewhat unfair assesment - but then again, this is the face she choose to show the world in her book. While much information is relevent her talk about casual and plentiful sex during her residency may strike some readers as irrelevant - With my medical background I did not think so. Everything about her and her extremely aggressive behavior with patients and fellow doctors indicates a woman with high levels of testosterone and with that usually comes a very active sex life - not a rare situation at all for those drawn to adrenalin rush of Emergency Medicine. This is not to indicate that she is not female in anyway, but it does helps he reader, at least this reader, understand whay she reacts so aggressively and why she enjoyed - indeed almost sought out, confrontations, including situations that were clearly dangerous for herself. This book is spares no one, including the author's own character faults, in her take no prisoners approach. It is hightly readable, laugh out loud funny on one page, cry on the next, leaving the reader a rollercoaster ride and yet due to the extremes in the people profiled - the Emergency patients and the author, the reader does not come away with much profound from the time spent other than the understanding that mental illness is vastly more complex than most of us understand and that those treating it are often markedly impacted by what they see day after day.

When I read the "about the author" blurb on the back page of the book, I could easily see Julie Holland, poised and perfect and sitting on the set at Good Morning America talking about psychopharmacology or the aftermath of 9/11. She has that polished professional look about her from her picture on the front cover. So I loved getting to see the underside of that professional. I loved hearing her inner monologue about her treatment of patients, her fascination with psychiatry and her love of Bellevue hospital. I love the stories of strange patients and her fear of them . Working a psych ward is a very harrowing job. She did an excellent job of explaining just what kind of person you have to be work weekend nights at the Bellevue Psychiatric Ward and what kind of person she really was inside. She tried for a few story arcs within the individual chapters of the horrifying patients. The one that was most stirring was the story of her dear friend Lucy, also the head of the ER department, who died of cancer. The stories of her own marriage and motherhood were important to the overall arc of the story but not compelling parts of narrative. I was waiting and interested to hear what happened to her on 9-11 but since she only works weekends that was really a non-story in the narrative. What is interesting for her and for the reader about 9-11 is that she will feel the after affects of the event for years afterwards. I think the piece that was missing was some sense of history or of the public reputation of Bellevue. I feel like Bellevue is this apocryphal hospital, and I wanted to know more about it. I got a glimpse of that history and reputation briefly toward the end when she tells a tale of a family trying to get their daughter out of Bellevue telling the good doctor that it is some sort of hell hole. The doctor makes fun of this attitude, but that belief comes from somewhere. If the book was a little long, I guess I would have liked less chapters on the nookie in the call room (I think I have seen all that on Grey's Anatomy.) and more on Bellevue the institution.