The Crisis Clinic

Set foot in the emergency room of a major university trauma center and follow the work of someone who has spent his professional life in that setting addressing every kind of life crisis: psychosis and suicide, depression and mania, violence and drug addiction, child and elder abuse, sudden illness and injury, death and grief.  He has some stories to tell: a man whose methamphetamine use provoked a dangerous paranoid psychosis, a woman imprisoned by a controlling, violent boyfriend, a brilliant suicidal student who can never be brilliant enough, a man robbed of life spirit by his narcissistic mother after the death of his father.  These stories and many more reveal to the reader the pain, poignancy, struggles, and even humor of emergency room patients and their families whose lives have been changed unexpectedly and abruptly.