Excellent Sources of Psychiatric
and Medical Satire
From Literature:
"The House of God" and "Mount Misery"
"The House of God" and "Mount Misery" are two satirical novels by Samuel Shem (Stephen Bergman, M.D.), who graduated from Harvard Medical School and earned a PhD in physiology from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is also a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College. Dr. Bergman is a practicing psychiatrist who is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and The Stone Center at Wellesley College, our nation's foremost women's college.
In his bestseller, "The House of God," Samuel Shem satirizes the practice of medicine and writes of adventures during the internship year of main character and intern, Roy Basch.
In his 2003 Afterward to The House of God, Samuel Shem writes:
"In August of 1978 The House of God came out. I imagined that everyone would love it. The younger generation of doctors did; the older generation hated it, and pilloried me."
"It
was a series of moments -- 'Hey, wait a second!' moments -- that we experience
every day when we see, hear, or feel that something is unjust, cruel,
militaristic or imperial, or simply not right.
Usually we let these moments pass. We do nothing to resist them. But the moments came so fast and furious during our internships, they could neither be ignored nor passed by.
We had been brought up to notice, to take 'life as it is' and turn it on the spindle of compassionate action to make it more like 'life as it could be.'
We resisted. We actually did. We stuck together and used classic nonviolent methods -- especially humor -- to
resist."
"I was a writer before I was a doctor." "The House of God and its sequel, Mount Misery, are what I conceive, now, as fictions of resistance."
"Twenty-five years and two million copies later, The House of God is commonly referred to as 'a classic.'
I look back on it now, and on the young man who wrote it, with gratitude. The novel has had an impact in addressing the brutality and inhumanity of medical training and practice.
My buddies are now in their fifties, in positions of power in medical schools, in health science and public policy.
Treated cruelly in their training, they'll be damned if they'll treat their trainees cruelly."
"What do I understand now about The House of God that I did not before?
First, connect. Isolation is deadly; connection heals.
In power-over systems like 'The House,' members of the subordinate group get isolated from each other -- and each gets isolated from his or her authentic experience of the system itself."
"As Chuck says in the novel, 'How can we care for patients, man, if'n nobody cares for us?'
The only threat to a dominant group is the quality of connection among the members of the subordinate group.
Stick together."
"Speak Up.
When we notice injustices and cruelties, we must speak up. Speaking up is not only necessary to call attention to the wrongs in the system -- whether it be medicine or America or the planet -- speaking up is essential for our survival as human beings."
In "Mount Misery", Samuel Shem writes about the further adventures of Roy Basch during Basch's psychiatry residency.
Praise for MOUNT MISERY, sequel to The House of God:
"An engrossing read....Darkly entertaining....Welcome to Mount Misery psychiatric hospital, home of the crazed, the suicidal, the Machiavellian, and the wicked. Here lurk compulsive liars, unrepentant adulterers, sexual deviates, even a certifiable lunatic or two. And those are just the doctors." -- The San Diego Union-Tribune
"The comic genius and holy terror of medicine rides again! Let the pompous and self-serving beware!" -- Leston Havens, Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
"Freud meets Prozac....Unabashed satire." -- Boston Herald
"Fueled with manic energy and hilarious characters." -- Entertainment Weekly
"When a psychiatrist speaks the truth, we have an exceptional book. Read Mount Misery and learn about true healing and life." -- Dr. Bernie Siegel
"Laws of Mount Misery"
(Quoted from the novel, Mount Misery)
"I. There are no laws in psychiatry."
"II. Psychiatrists specialize in their defects."
"III. At a psychiatric emergency, the first procedure is to check your own mental status."
"IV. The patient is not the only one with the disease, or without it."
"V. In psychiatry, first comes treatment, then comes diagnosis."
"VI. The worst psychiatrists charge the most, and world experts are the worst."
"VII. Medical school is a liability in becoming a psychotherapist."
"VIII. Your colleagues will hurt you more than your patients."
"IX. You can learn everything about a person by the way he or she plays a sport."
"X. Medical patients don't take their medications fifty percent of the time, and psychiatric patients don't take their medication much at all."
"XI. Therapy is part of life, and vice versa."
"XII. Healing in psychotherapy has nothing to do with psychology; connection, not self, heals."
"XIII. The delivery of psychiatric care is to know as little as possible, and to understand as much as possible, about living through sorrow with others."
Another Excerpt from Mount Misery:
One particularly colorful moment in Mount Misery involves Dr. Schlomo Dove, the psychiatry residency training director who has sex with his patients. Before having sex with the head nurse, psychiatry resident Roy Basch discovers Dr. Dove having sex with a patient (Chapter 16, pages 319-320):
"Ever since Ike White had died and Schlomo had taken over the prestigious position of Director of Residency Training, Schlomo had always told us residents that 'Schlomo's door is always open.' It never had been, so this time I pushed the door all the way open."
"Across the room on the analytic couch was a naked woman on her hands and knees, her breasts handing down, her back arched like a cat, and behind her pumping away against her so that his belly made slaps against her rump, was a naked Schlomo Dove. For a second he didn't see me. She turned her head. Our eyes met. It was Zoe. Seeing her turn her head, Schlomo turned his. In her eyes was horror. In his, rage. The two of them seemed frozen together, a pornographic ice sculpture."
"Zoe collapsed on her belly, hiding her face in her hands."
"Schlomo, penis encased in a condom and hanging below his belly like a surgical afterthought, jumped up and slammed the door in my face."
"A dead bolt was thrown. The door was locked."
"I stood there, head spinning, even in the first few seconds asking myself, Did I really see what I saw? -- already doubting it. I knew full well what I had seen, but I didn't know if I could bear seeing it, or knowing it, really."
"That night I spent with Gloria the head nurse. Glo fit my mood perfectly, as she was not particularly interested in it. Our lovemaking took place in pitch-black, soundlessly, on drugs. I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and found that her medicine cabinet was as chock full of drugs as a suburban freezer is with food."
"After she left for work, I got out of bed and went to the medicine cabinet. Many of the drugs were easily lethal. I pocketed a bottle of barbiturates -- phenobarb 30 mg. -- and left. When I got home I took one pill."
"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
“Regretfully, some mental health professionals still think "mental health" is synonymous with conformity. Consequently, Nonjohn recommends Ken Kesey's, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." This novel and the Academy-Award-Winning "Best Picture" derived from it remain timeless and powerful commentaries on the dangers of defining mental illness based on conformity. More generally, the novel is about personal liberty, freedom, and the fight against any person or institution with over-controlling values and behaviors as seen in Nurse Ratched.” -- Nonjohn, January 6, 2004
An Excerpt from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
“He stands looking at us, rocking back in his boots, an he laughs and laughs. He laces his fingers over his belly without taking his thumbs out of his pockets. I see how big and beat up his hands are. Everybody on the ward, patients, staff, and all, is stunned dumb by him and his laughing. There’s no move to stop him, no move to say anything. He laughs till he’s finished for a time, and he walks on into the day room. Even when he isn’t laughing, that laughing sound hovers around him, the way the sound hovers around a big bell just quit ringing – it’s in his eyes, in the way he smiles and swaggers, in the way he talks.” – Chief Bromden’s description of R. P. McMurphy.
From Cinema:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ranked as one of the top 20 movies of all time by the American Film Institute, "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" remains a timeless film for the same reasons that make the novel timeless. Also of note is the fact that real-life psychiatrist, Dr. Dean Brooks, played the opioid-addicted Dr. Spivey in the film.
Patch Adams - Based on true story and staring Academy Award-winner, Robin Williams, Patch Adams demonstrates that even "inappropriate" behavior can heal. The DVD from Universal Video describes Patch Adams as "a doctor who doesn't look act or think like any other doctor you've met before. For Patch, humor is the best medicine, and he's willing to do just about anything to make his patients laugh -- even if it means risking his own career."
From Television:
Scrubs - This is an excellent and extremely funny satirical television series about medical interns and residents trying to remain human during the frequently abusive and dehumanizing process of medical training. In addition to its surreal sequences, Scrubs offers an amazingly realistic depiction of the underlying and hope-sustaining humanity beneath the abusive, cruel, insecure, and personality-disordered individuals associated with the medical profession and with the training of doctors. This series is the best medical satire that I have ever seen on television.
Mad TV - Although this skit-comedy series is not consistently excellent, it does occasionally offer superb satirical skits dealing with medical and psychiatric themes, including a skit satirizing the egotism of William Shatner by depicting Shatner as running his own one-man sperm bank.