Author: Julie Holland File Type: mobi Amazon.com ReviewAmazon Exclusive Julie Holland on Weekends at Bellevue No one is immune from mental illness. After working at New York Citys Bellevue Hospital for nine years, as the psychiatrist in charge of admissions at the psych E.R. on Saturday and Sunday nights, I came away knowing this for sure. Over the years, I admitted heiresses and art dealers, altar boys and college students, homecoming queens, studio executives, bankers, lawyers, correction officers, and the list goes on. No matter who you are, what you do for a living, how much money you have in the bank, or how often you go to church, circumstances can transpire that will bring you to Bellevue. This is one of the hardest lessons for our patients to learn. My years at Bellevue taught me many things, life lessons I could never have hoped to receive elsewhere, but the main take-home message was this cherish your sanity, for it can be lost in the blink of an eye. Sometimes I saw the same patients repeatedly, alcoholics and addicts who were hitting bottom in regular cycles, showing up when their funds ran out. Other times, however, I met patients with no psychiatric history, who ended up at Bellevue when a bad break-up led to a suicide attempt, or a shared cigarette at a bar led to a PCP-induced psychosis. There are so many ways in which a life can suddenly unravel, and many of my patients could specify just when that started to happen for them--whether it was joining the army, leaving home for college, or living through the death of their child. Many of the people I encountered at Bellevue tried strenuously to convince me that they did not belong there. Or vice versa. A big part of my job was learning how to separate the genuinely disturbed from the fakers (some people actually wanted to be admitted to Bellevue, if only for the promise of a clean bed and three meals a day), and to identify the people who had been misunderstood, misdiagnosed, who werent mentally ill at all. After a few years of Bellevue experiences under my belt, I developed a sixth sense for what real crazy looked like, sounded like, and yes, smelled like. One night a young man was brought in to the E.R. because he was found on a street corner preaching to passersby to give up their worldly possessions. I knew enough to listen and wait, and not rush to judgment, even though it might have seemed a no-brainer to admit him. Once I was able to draw him out, I learned that he had taken psychedelic mushrooms and then spent time in a Chelsea art gallery known as COSM, which I myself had been to and knew to be an intense, inspirational and potentially overwhelming experience, something that might well unhinge a person on mind-altering drugs. I spoke with him gently as his trip slowly ebbed, helping him to navigate his re-entry in the city hospital where he had landed with no money or identification. He stayed in touch with me for months afterwards, grateful that I was there to protect him when he soared--however briefly--beyond the boundaries of normal behavior. There is a diaphanous membrane between sane and insane. It is the flimsiest of barriers, and because any one of us can break through at any time, it terrifies us, causing us to turn our backs on those who remind us of this painful reality. But spending so much time with people who marched out of the lockstep of sanity has made me less forgiving of the way the mentally ill are ostracized and shunned. We owe them something better. And we should remember that the barrier separating them from us is not nearly as secure as we might think.--Julie HollandFrom Publishers WeeklyIn this disjointed memoir, Holland describes her nine-year odyssey as a doctor on the night shift at New York Citys Bellevue hospital, a name that has become synonymous with insanity. Holland met a bewildering assortment of drunks, sociopaths, schizophrenics and homeless people malingering in hope of a warm place to crash. As the physician in charge of the psychiatric emergency room, the hard-boiled Holland acted as gatekeeper, deciding who would be sent upstairs to the psych ward, to Central Booking or back to the streets. The book also covers Hollands personal life from her student days as a wannabe rock star to her psychotherapy sessions, her sexual escapades and her marriage and birth of her children. Holland captures the rhythms and routines of the E.R. with its unbearable suffering, petty jealousies and gallows humor. She is less successful at maintaining any kind of narrative continuity. Chapters generally run only a couple of pages and often depict random anecdotes that most likely sound better than they read. *(Oct.) * Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Author: Bob Woodward File Type: epub The Agenda is a day-by-day, often minute-by-minute account of Bill Clintons White House. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, confidential internal memos, diaries, and meeting notes, Woodward shows how Clinton and his advisers grappled with questions of lasting importance - the federal deficit, health care, welfare reform, taxes, jobs. One of the most intimate portraits of a sitting president ever published, this edition includes an afterword on Clintons efforts to save his presidency. **

Author: Ian Maclean File Type: pdf This study of the world of scholarship and scholarly texts in the Renaissance, the so-called respublica literaria, affords insights into the intellectual infrastructure and modes of thought of the period by its examination of contemporary attitudes towards women. It addresses the questions What is the notion of woman to be found in Renaissance texts, and how does it evolve? What is the relationship between the notion of woman and that of sex difference, and how is sex difference related in turn to other differences and to the concept of difference itself? Theology, medicine, ethics, politics, and law are examined in succeeding chapters. The threads of the investigation are then drawn together and Dr Maclean shows how the notion of woman was influenced by both forces of conservatism and forces which fostered change, forces which were to be found both inside the confines of intellectual life and beyond them. The final section offers a context for the understanding of European Renaissance feminism and sketches its connections with social and political evolution, humanist scholarship, religious thought and finally problems of language and expression.Review...fascinating and meticulously researched new study. Journal of the History of Medicine Book DescriptionThis monograph, dealing with the intellectual notions held during the Renaissance of what woman is, surveys the ideas of the nature of woman, sex difference and sex discrimination, and the emergence of a feminist movement in the first half of the 17th century.

Author: Aleksandra Kaminska File Type: pdf From an Eastern nation on the global periphery, to a European neoliberal democracy enmeshed in transnational networks. This book follows Polands transformation through the lens (and mirror) of media art, as a new generation of artists negotiates the path between the forces of extreme nationalism and hyper-Catholicism, whilst attempting to claim space in the global cosmopolitan imaginary. Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field argues that artistic practices function as experiments in the continued re-imagination and reclamation of the Polish site - with media art specifically offering a powerful space for self-enfranchisement. This conclusion is traced through Polands artistic history from the Constructivists to neo-expressionism, towards an archeology of experimentation. Through interviews with leading artists, scholars and curators, media art is seen using technology to democratize the past, challenging master-narratives through sharing individual memories, and excavating local urban histories. This is the first full-length study to acknowledge the role of media art in shaping, reflecting and transforming Poland into a plural and heterogeneous democracy - finding a path to its future by reclaiming the space of its past.