This is a memoir by the psychiatrist who ultimately headed the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital reserved for mentally ill Rykers Island prisoners, from when she was an intern up through Hurricane Sandy and the problems of evacuating mentally ill prisoners from a flooded hospital when nowhere else would accept them.

The book was an interesting glimpse into the problems of balancing the authority of the correctional officers with the medical needs of the patients. The author also relates her personal struggles to balance her family life with her professional life, as well as some of the incidents in which she felt her life was at risk. She is certainly a compassionate and empathetic doctor and person. The book was interesting and realistic, but not too much amazing happened, despite the title.

3 stars ( )

This book made me so angry, incredibly sad, appalled and disgusted with our legal system and federal government in their agregious treatment of the mentally ill. This is supposed to be one of the most advanced countries on our planet but our health care for the mentally ill has declined steadily ever since Reagan's mandates and his emptying of the institutions put in place to handle these cases. Leaving many with few options but life on the street.

The author Dr. Elizabeth Ford spent many years working with the forensic patients in Bellevue. Patients deemed too mentally ill to exist in the regular prison population at Rikers. She has worked in different positions eventually becoming director and her struggles to have these mentally ill patient/prisoners treated with a modicum of dignity and kindness, resonated deeply. Their stories are often heartbreaking, but there are a few successes and one in particular made me teary eyed. Do you know that in our so called enlightened legal system there is a law that says a person must be declared sane before he can enter a plea of insanity? Seriously. This will be the conundrum faced by one of the schitzophrenic prisoners in this book.

These are people with few resources, many have no families and many are seriously mentally ill and our country's answer is to lock them away, hide them and forget about them. Out of 5000 prisoners at Rikers, 1000 are considered to be suffering with various degrees of mental illness. Appalling. These prisoners are the ones most often beat up, generally will serve longer sentences than their so called normal counterparts. The men and women who work with these prisoners should be applauded, they are doing their understaffed, underfunded best, with little reward. When will this country take mental illness out of the dark ages, and yes I know some will just decide to quit taking their medications, but when and if they are released where can they go. Surely there can be better solutions than just considering them numbers in a budget, to be managed and thrown into a prison population that can do little but make them worse.

As you can see this book had a huge impact on me, read it and see how you feel when you are done. Eye opening at the least. ( )