You don’t have to be mad to work here

A woman with bipolar flies from America in a wedding dress to marry Harry Styles. A lorry driver with schizophrenia believes he’s got a cure for coronavirus. A depressed psychiatrist hides his profession from his GP due to stigma. Most of the characters in this book are his patients. Some of them are his family. One of them is him. Unlocking the doors to the psych ward, NHS psychiatrist Dr Benji Waterhouse provides a fly-on-the-padded-wall account of medicine’s most mysterious and controversial speciality. 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?