Patient Poets

"'Patient poets: Illness from inside out' invites readers to consider what caregivers and medical professionals may learn from poetry by patients. It offers reflections on poetry as a particularly apt vehicle for articulating the often isolating experiences of pain, fatigue, changed life rhythms, altered self-understanding, embarrassment, resistance, and acceptance. The chapters discuss poems that represent a particular dimension of the experience of illness or disability -- foreboding, isolation, fear, shame, wry humor, acceptance, deepening self-knowledge." -- Back cover.

Best-selling author Steven Heighton's considerable dramatic lyric powers reach a new sophistication and intensity in the astonishing new collection Patient Frame. The book ranges from the court of the Medicis to the Mai Lai massacre; from love for a daughter and mother, through nightmare and displacement, to moments of painful acceptance; and from erotic passion to situations of deep moral failure. Heighton's work has long shown a resolve to achieve viable rapprochement between the mind’s cold structures and the earthbound drives of the body, and here these poems are part of an ongoing search, a scanning of our human horizons for moments of lasting value. These dynamic, vigorous, and tender poems are as engaged with the moment as they are with traditions of East and West. The collection also brings together more of Heighton's vital translations of poets as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges and Horace.

Governor General's Literary Award finalist and bestselling author Steven Heighton's considerable dramatic lyric powers reach a new sophistication and intensity in his astonishing collection Patient Frame. From the court of Medici to the My Lai massacre; from love for a daughter and mother, through nightmare and displacement, to moments of painful acceptance; from erotic passion to situations of deep moral failure, these poems are part of an ongoing search, a scanning of our human horizons for moments of lasting value. Heighton's work has long shown a resolve to achieve some viable rapprochement between the mind's cold structures and the earthbound drives of the body. Dynamic, vigorous, tender poems as engaged with the moment as they are with traditions of East and West. Patient Frame brings together more of Heighton's vital translations of poets as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges and Horace.

J. Marion Sims, the legendary, now controversial, 19th century gynecologist looms large in Bettina Judd's recent collection Patient. Sophisticated, complex, haunting, Patient. beckons readers to remember, to feel, to think deeply, to discover, to probe. Slavery's stench, the bodies of Black women, death, scientific racism, memory-these themes link the poems in extraordinary ways. Judd is a masterful new poet. Patient. is unforgettable!! -Beverly Guy-Sheftall

In this collection of 16 essays, poets discuss psychiatric treatment and their work. Poets on Prozac shatters the notion that madness fuels creativity by giving voice to contemporary poets who have battled myriad psychiatric disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance abuse. The sixteen essays collected here address many provocative questions: Does emotional distress inspire great work? Is artistry enhanced or diminished by mental illness? What effect does substance abuse have on esthetic vision? Do psychoactive medications impinge on ingenuity? Can treatment enhance inherent talents, or does relieving emotional pain shut off the creative process? Featuring examples of each contributor’s poetry before, during, and after treatment, this original and thoughtful collection finally puts to rest the idea that a tortured soul is one’s finest muse. Honorable Mention, 2008 PROSE Award for Best Book in Psychology. “A fascinating collection of 16 essays, as insightful as they are compulsively readable. Each is honest and sharply written, covering a range of issues (depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, psychosis, substance abuse or, in acutely deadpan Andrew Hudgins’s case, “tics, twitches, allergies, tooth-grinding, acid reflux, migraines . . . and shingles”) along with treatment methods, incorporating personal anecdotes and excerpts from poems and journals. . . . Anyone affected by mental illness or intrigued by the question of its role in the arts should find this volume absorbing.” —Publishers Weekly “Berlin has done a marvelous job of showing us how ordinary poets are; the selected poets have shown us that mental illness shares with other experiences a capacity to reveal our humanity.” —Metapsychology

Poetry. African American Studies. Women's Studies. "Bettina Judd's phenomenal debut poetry collection, PATIENT., is about recovery in many senses: recovery of the subjectivity of several historical figures, through the recovery, reconstitution, and telling of their stories among them Anarcha Westcott, Betsey Harris, Lucy Zimmerman, Joice Heth, Saartjie Baartman, and Henrietta Lacks, who were infamously 'patients' or subjects of inspection and 'plunder' by, among others, J. Marion Sims, the controversial gynecologist, and P.T. Barnum, showman and circus founder. Sims (and the speculum) and Barnum are the featured antagonists in many of these flawlessly empathetic poems, but an unnamed speaker who adds a contemporary voice to the lyric chorus implicates those in charge of her care during a present-day hospital stay at Johns Hopkins suggesting the linkage of modern medical treatment to the traumas vulnerable Black women, enslaved and not, suffered at the hands of unethical scientists and physicians in earlier eras. In the collection's opening poem, the speaker reckons, '...verdicts come in a bloodline' and she determines 'to recover' from 'an ordeal with medicine' by 'learn ing] why ghosts come to me.' She ends her testimony by asking, 'Why am I patient?' (Read that line in however many nuanced ways you want.) In this profoundly layered witnessing, the subject might be 'in the dark ghetto of my body, ' or 'an idea of metaphors that live where bodies cannot.' Yet even as Judd vividly evokes the precise brutalities visited upon the Black female body and psyche letting us see and hear women who 'quieted / broke into many pieces' these poems also speak of 'shedding something, ' 'another kind of sloughing.' Ultimately, PATIENT. enacts a healing and move toward wholeness, recovery of, as one speaker puts it, 'spirit that] flees the body and / its treacherous / tearing.'" Sharan Strange "Bettina Judd's stunning poetry invites us to imagine the experiences of enslaved women subjected to gynecological experiments-the blood, pain, loss, shame, and survival. Linking past and present, Patient brilliantly condemns the inhumanity of professionals who infringe black women's bodies and celebrates the humanity of those who resist them. It will disturb and move your spirit." Dorothy Roberts "Joice Heth. Lucy Zimmerman. Betsey Harris. Anarcha Wescott. Bettina Judd ensures you will remember the names of four women assaulted by science, violated by curiosity--survivors of physical invasion and torturous experiments. She presents their dignity, heretofore denied, as imagined in their own voices in conversation and parallel with a modern speaker, similarly (coldly) ensnared by a medical machine powered by detachment at best, cruelty at worst. Judd re-centers the narrative, however, to where it belongs--on the person(s) confronted, examined, in pain-not on the problem to be studied or solved. In visceral language that indicts, worships, haunts, and empowers, Patient illuminates 'a dynasty, a bloodline, a body' imbued with the full human spectrum of emotion and brilliance." Khadijah Queen"

This is a practical and comprehensive guide to communication in family medicine for doctors nurses and staff in the primary healthcare team. It brings together all facets of communication in healthcare including involvement of patients staff and external workers. It shows how to address all aspects of communication in relation to one-to-one situations teaching and groups and encourages the reader to reflect on their own clinical and work experience. Using think boxes exercises and references this is an accessible guide relevant to all members of the practice team.