SPOTLIGHT -
April 22nd 2024
"I pulled my scuffle hoe hard through the clay’s crust and heard the blade scrape metal and earth."
April 19th 2024
"And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold, And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold."
April 12th 2024
"I shall forget civilization, I shall forget color, caste, I shall move in a fantastic world of raceless men and women..."
April 5th 2024
"rescued from the filth of paradise, hosed off, shining, my cracked fingernails caked with dirt."
March 29th 2024
"The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded."
Psychiatry Comic: Have a Heart
"If I only had a heart."
Lung Cancer in Reverse Times-Lapse Photography
At three breaths before death a blue latex hand pulls out a trach tube, a blade skims over the zipped up hole, and droplets of blood are sucked into skin...
The Intern’s Spot
We teach every intern how to find the place where they can lay down a silver stethoscope and listen to everything...
Professionalism Defined
After your exams, after your diploma, after all the nights on call, missed dinners and diagnoses, after your apologies...
The Ladder
Bolted to the bedroom loft, twenty feet high with lacquered sides and honey colored risers polished with pine-scented wax-these are the rungs I climb to the feather bed, candle, and bottle of red wine...
The Yellow Pages
Sleepless in New Haven, I read this hotel room’s only other book. Power-suited lawyers on the back cover advertise to sue for antidepressant suicides if families will call 1-800-BAD-MEDS...
Psychiatry Comic: Ruffled Feathers
Almost everyone can benefit from psychotherapy at some point in their lives.
Letter From Luke
He wrote that he didn’t know what to say to comfort us, so he decided to describe the view from his rented room near Sydney...
End of the Season
Half price T-shirts and ice cream cones, no more tomatoes or New York Times, people out patching the roof, putting up storms, the last guests gone tomorrow.
Psychiatry Comic: Save the What?
Is the hippo [campus] an endangered species?
At the Monhegan Island General Store
I’m happy to be off the trail, out of the wind and salt spray, safe from the fog’s cold claw...
Naked Mole Rat
I’m glad we’re studying this one, a lusty, almost immortal guy living in his dark tunnels of love.
Über Coca
He didn’t notice snow falling in the Krankenhaus courtyard the night he fell in love. A mere intern, castrated by Jew-hating med school professors...
After Divorce Court
I drive west along the black granite bed of Cold River as it sweeps down the mountain. My best friend drives the same road east, the lies his wife told the judge trailing us...
The Stethoscope
Laennec was running late when he saw children send sounds through a wooden beam...
VIP Referral
When a health system honcho asks me to see his thirty-year-old son “for a little anxiety” I can only agree. He arrives with a girlfriend, the couple dressed like characters from an Armani ad...
Psychiatry Comic: Consumer Delusion
"If only I had this, I would feel that."
Winter Rorschach Test
A penguin? An igloo? A big snowflake? Weigh in on this Rorschach-type image, just for fun.
The Fisherman
Tears track his leathered face like seawater spilled from a sinking hull...
Psychiatry Comic: Winter Medications
Post-holiday hangover? Here are some comical treatments to beat the winter blues.
Still Practicing
My penmanship sucks. So does my typing. I’ve been this way since seventh grade...
A Psychiatrist’s Diet
Looking out at a flat gray sea, I try to imagine the chasms in the ocean’s floor where lava laced with strontium pours...
We Journey On
A poem written by a psychiatrist: "A faith in human kindness lost, abandonment with lasting cost."
Caring for the Patient
I want my patients to believe I consider Peabody’s advice before I see them, that I recognize our shared humanity...
Up in Smoke
He smoked trabucos, mild miniatures produced by the Austrian monopoly, but preferred Don Pedros and Reina Cubanos...
Psychiatry Comic: Be Negative
The lab results came back and here's what the doctor found.
Looking Like a God
The trouble with looking like a God becomes clear after we learn to wear our mask of omnipotence, pretending to know the answers to questions...
Psychiatry Comic: Beach Reading
These books almost write themselves.
A Lobsterman Looks at the Sea
His new hip healed in, we’re working on a bluff, talking doctors and health care reform as we shove a new propane tank into place...
The Death of an Addict
As clinicians, we can only imagine what happens when patients terminate treatment. Thoughts from an addiction psychiatry fellow.