Weekends at Bellevue

July 13, 2009
In this disjointed memoir, Holland describes her nine-year odyssey as a doctor on the night shift at New York City's Bellevue hospital, a name that has become synonymous with insanity. Holland met a bewildering assortment of drunks, sociopaths, schizophrenics and homeless people malingering in hope of a warm place to crash. As the physician in charge of the psychiatric emergency room, the hard-boiled Holland acted as gatekeeper, deciding who would be sent upstairs to the psych ward, to Central Booking or back to the streets. The book also covers Holland's personal life from her student days as a wannabe rock star to her psychotherapy sessions, her sexual escapades and her marriage and birth of her children. Holland captures the rhythms and routines of the E.R. with its unbearable suffering, petty jealousies and gallows humor. She is less successful at maintaining any kind of narrative continuity. Chapters generally run only a couple of pages and often depict random anecdotes that most likely sound better than they read.

July 15, 2009
Psychiatrist Holland recounts nine years working the weekend shift in the emergency room of one of the nation's iconic psychiatric hospitals.

When she started her job at the Bellevue psych ER, 30-year-old Holland (editor: Ecstasy: The Complete Guide, 2001) was single, intelligent and tough. Prisoners in chains, battered women, the homeless, desperate and delusional—all became an exercise in how quickly a patient could be treated and released. Readers meet an endless procession of these broken souls, some more sympathetic than others, and get a sense of the difficulty of the author's job. Holland describes how the staff competed to identify which patients were feigning symptoms to score a warm bed and hot meal, until the author, shaken after a scary incident, realized that"even the lying patients are still coming to the hospital because they are in need. Don't send them away empty-handed." Unfortunately, few of the patients' stories are particularly memorable, and Holland misses countless opportunities to make them so. Because she is so focused on her journey from tough girl to"working mother of two with a heart of mush," the take-home message from each of these vignettes, when there is one, almost always relates only to the narrator—who, despite this, does not come across as a particularly self-aware storyteller. There are some moving moments of genuine insight, but they are dulled by so much extraneous detail that everything starts to feel arbitrary. A more focused narrative, with half as many patients whose stories carried twice as much weight, would have made for a much stronger book.

Despite a promising premise and a few fascinating stories, the book is ill-focused and overlong.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2009
If, as psychiatrist Holland says, Psychosis is boundless; the degree to which someone can lose their mind is infinite, and Bellevue gets the worst of the worst, why would anybody (ahem, in their right mind) want to work with the mentally ill? Because the workings of the mind, especially a damaged mind, are fascinating. Because one cannot stand idly by and not try helping those who hear voices when no one is speaking. Because of the challenge of walking further out on the metaphorical airplane wing than anyone else dares to. Because there is the occasional payoff, the ray of hope when a patient can begin a productive new life. During Hollands tenure at New Yorks Bellevue Hospitals psychiatric emergency room, however, those ray-of-hope moments were vastly outnumbered by the jarringly extreme cases that dominated her time. Whether for a walk-in or a special delivery via police car, Holland was pretty much a psychiatric patients leadoff person, the one who would determine stay or go. This account of her service is equal parts affecting, jaw-dropping, and engrossing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)