Comedian and doctor Benji Waterhouse is the author of ‘You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Work Here’ to be published via Vintage on 16th May. The NHS psychiatrist provides a fly-on-the-padded-wall account of medicine’s most mysterious and controversial speciality. Unlocking the doors to the psych ward….
A woman in a wedding dress arrives at the hospital looking for Harry Styles.
A lorry driver with schizophrenia believes he’s got a cure for coronavirus.
A depressed man hides his profession from his GP due to stigma.
Most of the psychiatric cases in this book are his patients. Some of them are family. One of them is him. Why would anyone in their right mind choose to be a psychiatrist? Are the solutions to people’s messy lives really within medical school textbooks? And how can vulnerable patients receive the care they need when psychiatry lacks staff, hospital beds and any actual cures?
‘You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here’ explores these complicated questions from both sides of the doctor’s desk.
“In recent years we’ve all seen a welcome shift in the openness with which mental health is discussed in the world around us. Conditions such as anxiety and depression no longer carry the weight of stigma that kept many suffering in isolation and silence. It’s still easy for us, however, to avert our collective gaze from the more severe, chronic labels. We’re often fearful at the mention of the likes of schizophrenia, personality disorders or bipolar, and of those living with them. My book is about these people, the patients I care for as an NHS psychiatrist. The ones for whom cold-water swimming and mindful colouring won’t touch the sides. The ones you’ll have seen around town, but perhaps find yourself edging away from. That person muttering to themselves on the bus. The one behaving unpredictably in the street.
You may be surprised to see me bring humour to my story, and to see this psychiatrist sitting on both sides of the doctor’s desk. 1 in 4 of us will experience mental health problems at some point in our lives, and I count myself among them. I’ve experienced the unremitting burden on over-stretched psychiatrist that means the spectre of mental illness is never far from our minds. I’ve also found that humour surfaces in the bleakest of circumstances – a universal balm that helps us all carry on.”
Dr Benji Waterhouse is a front-line NHS doctor specialising in psychiatry based in London. He is also an award-winning stand-up comedian who performs sell-out shows at the Edinburgh Festival. He has written for the Guardian and Independent, and was included in a list of 'Inspiring Psychiatrists’ by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He has a special interest in psychedelic research and worked on the ground-breaking study featured in the BBC documentary ‘The Psychedelic Drug Trial’.
Last May he appeared in the BBC Radio 4 Comedy show ‘Best Medicine’. You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here is his first book and was acquired by Penguin in a nine-way with the TV rights already sold to the BBC Studio’s owned House Productions.
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