Sometimes Amazing Things Happen - Elizabeth Ford

Sometimes Amazing Things Happen

By Elizabeth Ford

  • Release Date: 2017-04-25
  • Genre: Psychiatry
Score: 4
4
From 21 Ratings

Description

From the Executive Director of Mental Health for Correctional Services in New York City, comes a revelatory and deeply compassionate memoir that takes readers inside Bellevue, and brings to life the world—the system, the staff, and the haunting cases—that shaped one young psychiatrist as she learned how to doctor and how to love. 

Elizabeth Ford went through medical school unsure of where she belonged. It wasn’t until she did her psychiatry rotation that she found her calling—to care for one of the most vulnerable populations of mentally ill people, the inmates of New York's jails, including Rikers Island, who are so sick that they are sent to the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward for care.

These men were broken, unloved, without resources or support, and very ill. They could be violent, unpredictable, but they could also be funny and tender and needy. Mostly, they were human and they awakened in Ford a boundless compassion. Her patients made her a great doctor and a better person and, as she treated these men, she learned about doctoring, about nurturing, about parenting, and about love.  

While Ford was a psychiatrist at Bellevue she becomes a wife and a mother. In her book she shares her struggles to balance her life and her work, to care for her children and her patients, and to maintain the empathy that is essential to her practice—all in the face of a jaded institution, an exhausting workload, and the deeply emotionally taxing nature of her work. 

Ford brings humor, grace, and humanity to the lives of the patients in her care and in beautifully rendered prose illuminates the inner workings (and failings) of our mental health system, our justice system, and the prison system.

Reviews

  • Disappointing

    2
    By RiccoV
    Having worked as a psychologist in the forensic mental health field I'd looked forward to a feeling of shared experience. What had she seen and how had she handled it? It's a different and very challenging field with millions of stories to tell. Unfortunately the author missed most of them. Very little opportunity to look over her shoulder as she was working with a patient. Very little reflection as to what worked and why; should she have looked at something different. Absolutely nothing to learn from this. More of a narcissistic indulgence from a spoiled Manhattan psychiatrist. So much of the book was about how she managed the flooding from the "big storm". Who really cares? Pleasant, but a waste of time.

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