Rating: 
Summary: I've read worse and I've read better in the genre.
Review: ... This novel is not nearly as funny as the first book and raises very few questions other than the trite "Who would want to be a Resident?" question answered much better in Shem's first book.This book also concentrates almost solely on esoteric abnormal psychology and is hard to relate to. I'm a family practice physician who did quite a few psych rotations in school and residency and I still don't quite relate to this book and its content. However, Shem still is the master of describing medical malcontents masquerading as compassionate physicians. And the book was worth reading for that reason even though it wasn't as entertaining as House of God.
Rating:
Summary: Not very original...
Review: After reading "House of God", I've decided to try the sequel, and was VERY disappointed - it seemed to have the same jokes, the same struggles, etc. On top of that I felt that even though the book was set a little over a year after "House of God", was written about an Era quite a whle later...
Rating: 
Summary: funny and subversive
Review: As a consumer who has, with difficulty, extricated herself from a mental health maze much like the one in "Mount Misery" I can vouch that as overblown as some of these characters and situations, there is a LOT of truth there, too, and it would be unwise for any would-be shrink who picked up this book to ignore it. Samuel Shem is an equal opportunity offender. Freudians, drug docs, behavioralists, insurance companies, you name it, it's taken aim at here. As the young protagonist attempts to negotiate the various psychiatric schools and their devotees, there are suicides and unsavory sex scandals and more. Not being a doctor myself, I preferred this book to the "House of God." My favorite part concerned the over-prescription of Prozac and other antidepressants of its class. I have been prescribed it by docs who don't know me from Adam and whose ignorance doesn't trouble them in the least. Shem may be over-exaggerating some dangers, but when it comes to many of the situations portrayed in the book, he's dead on (no pun).
Rating: 
Summary: A Insanely Horrific Reality!- WARNING!
Review: As someone who has had a career in the medical field since the age of 15 to 40++, and then went into Psychiatry, this book and my recollections of it both help and haunt me presently.
This book seems to have somehow predicted the present state of Psychiatry. One dominated by "catch-22's", lose-lose paradigms, and Kafka-like life situations. Most, if not all of the situations, in the book, however unbelieveable, DO/CAN/WILL occur- which is so congruent with everything else going on these days.
Special interests, politicians, criminals, drug-addicts, and drug companies dominate the landscape. Many people treated in the community were not "mentally ill" until they learned to do alcohol/drugs, scam the system, and intimidate the unwaring, fearful, or ignorant providers to get what they want,be it drugs and/or benefits. Many criminals learn this system and can scam their way out of jail, even for murder! These people are generally successful!
Unfortunately, the book, being "fictional", and not an expose, does not address the shear horror of "modern psychiatry", but on the other hand what does? Thanks to the constant fear of death, litigation, or worse...the few Psychiatrists who are smart enough to recognize reality...are also the most afraid to talk or confront the APA-drug/academic industry-political alliance.
In conclusion, this book is a heroic effort to expose more people to the horrors of "Psychiatry". On a brighter note, there are rare individual who are good Psychiatrists...but they are as rare as an honest attorney or auto-mechanic.
P.S.- WARNING- Don't read this book if you don't want your "reality" altered. If you do---denial works well!
Rating: 
Summary: This guy can't write characters
Review: Aside from not being all that funny, the big problem with this book is that -- except for the narrator -- the characters are uniformly unidimensional and not particularly believable. This is death for a novel, and this one obliges by dying early on. The main character is interesting enough to keep you interested for maybe the first 250 pages, but no more.
Rating:
Summary: Misery Loves Company
Review: Beware all ye who enter here! On the surface, this is a chronicle of Dr. Roy Basch's first year of psychiatric residency. DIG DEEPER FOLKS. Exposed, for all the world to see, is the soft seamy underbelly of psychiatry and medicine in general. The first chilling fact is that most medical researchers make horrible clinicians. It's publish or perish, participate in a study, try untested drugs on your patients, because that's where the money is. Yes, there are researchers who make excellent practitioners. I was lucky enough to publish with one, but they are the exception. The second chiller is that the Attendings(the head docs)don't always know best. They teach their theories and their experience (remember Dr. Freud and Dr. Spock) but they're not always right. Then Fats reminds us, don't forget our friends (the medical insurance companies) who decide how sick or suicidal or crazy we are. They then pay according to their theory of how long it will take us to get well or how long they want to pay---whichever comes first.The final point Dr. Roy makes, though, is the most important. Psychiatry should be all about being human and connecting to another human being needing help. Wrong again folks. It's about pushing pills, talking as little as posssible and putting people in little boxes to fit the DSM diagnosis. By the time the docs get to us, all the human has been drummed out of them. I wish I could say I enjoyed this as much as "The House of God". Unfortunately, Shem takes too long to tell the story, but it's still worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: How can you go wrong with crazy people?
Review: By a Mr. Samuel Shem, Mount Misery is a fun and intriguing read. With a subject like psychiatry and crazy people, it's hard to imagine how it could be otherwise, but Shem's spun it into an interesting- what to call it?- human drama story, I suppose. (As opposed to what? Celery drama? Ah well.) It took me a few pages to get interested, but once into it I found- without wishing to sound like a lit student- the Jewish persepctive and the psychiatric persepctive both rewarding. Learned a little about Freud, about other psychiatric methods, and was left with the bleak picture of what psychiatry in America has become- an industry where money is king and talking to patients- even treating obviously ill people- is taboo unless they have the dough.
Memorable characters- A.K. and Schlomo in particular, and it is a character driven novel. This book never once departs from complete believability. It seems like you're reading word for word an organized and honest journal. Perhaps it is.
Fine novel, better than House of God, which was also a fine novel. You don't need to be a med student to enjoy these two books.
Rating:
Summary: Medical Error in Amazon excerpt -- is the rest any better?
Review: Check out "look inside this book"; read the excerpt. See the glaring error -- the controversial sleep aid Halcion misspelled as Halcyon?
Why don't publishers hire competent copyeditors when preparing texts with medical content? I'm willing to bet there are more errors waiting to be found.
The story seems engaging, based on the excerpt. It's probably worth $3.50 foright a used copy, but I'm not expecting more than light entertainment.
Rating:
Summary: Further adventures of Roy Basch in the world of malpractice
Review: Dr. Stephen Bergman, aka Samuel Shem, did his medical internship at a large, academic hospital in Boston after graduating from Harvard Medical School. The experiences of his internship served as the basis for his 1984 novel, THE HOUSE OF GOD, starring his alter ego, Dr. Roy Basch. In GRACEFULLY INSANE, a narrative history of McLean Hospital, the mental health facility traditionally serving Boston's upper crust, author Alex Beam notes that Bergman did his psychiatry residency at McLean. Presumably, this and subsequent experiences in the field, enabled Bergman to write MOUNT MISERY, the further adventures of Dr. Basch during his first year of training at the fictional Mount Misery psychiatric hospital.
MOUNT MISERY is billed as a dark comedy. And perhaps the first half of the book is just that. Then it becomes decidedly more serious - Bergman's indictment of what he perceives as the flaws, and indeed malpractice, within institutionalized mental health care: assembly line admissions with diagnoses designed to mine the maximum in insurance payments, over-reliance on unproven drug regimens to make patients "better", the emphasis on fund raising rather than medicine, the superegos of the "experts" that focus on appearances in medical journals and at international seminars instead of compassionate patient care, and the total hogwash (to Bergman, apparently) of Freudian analysis. Indeed, the author's criticism of institutional psychiatry evolves to a very sharp point, i.e. the sexual abuse of patients by their physician therapists, and the protection of the latter by the medical establishment. This is not the stuff of humor, dark or otherwise.
I still might have given MOUNT MISERY four stars but for several reasons. First, at 527 paperbacked pages, the book is way too long; the point could've been made in a shorter span of text. Second, once Bergman makes his case against the failures of the system, he, through the intrepid Dr. Roy, gets too preachy. (I hate being lectured in any medium designed to extract my dollars ostensibly to provide me with entertainment.) Finally, the author bends over backwards to tidy up the story's conclusion with relatively happy endings for the novel's major and minor protagonists. Indeed, the very last scenes involving Basch, his significant other Berry, and their adopted daughter Lizzy, were so warm and fuzzy as to almost induce the gag reflex. (OK, so I'm a curmudgeon and am in need of Prozac. But, give me a break!)
As I recall, I also rated THE HOUSE OF GOD at only three stars for similar reasons. I suspect MOUNT MISERY would appeal greatly to anti-establishment psychiatrists and other mental health caregivers, who would respond "Yup, been there, done that!". But, no more Samuel Shem stuff for me, thanks very much. Life is too short for well-intentioned rants that don't reveal anything new.
Rating:
Summary: So accurate, it's scary!!!
Review: I am a Psychiatric R.N. at a county hospital. The situations and profiles of the M.D.'s and other staff in this book are very real. The only difference is the book is set in a private hospital. The county hospital setting is even MORE dysfunctional!!!! I loved the book, and am going to read House of God again, too.
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