SPOTLIGHT -
July 12th 2024
"...the beauty still intoxicating, the spirit of the research like a child swimming for the first time in the sea, awed..."
July 11th 2024
"By now I’ve lost track of time with this boy who reminds me of myself when I imagined becoming a doctor..."
July 5th 2024
"Remember? Remember wanting to play every minute, as if that was why we were born?"
June 28th 2024
"How free is our will if our fate is decided by our melanin. What is the meaning of Black lives when so many people don’t think we matter?"
June 21st 2024
"Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels, the only one you ever hear is how many can dance on the head of a pin..."
The Show Must Go On
A phone rings on stage like a flashback and we return to our fantasy that characters can die and revive, that the show must go on . . .
Psychiatrists Are Not the Retiring Kind
The past is prologue riding close behind. Give up your practice? And do what instead? Psychiatrists are not the retiring kind!
Not Guilty
Our daughter’s first day of Med School ten years ago, computer charged, a career choice . . .
Needlepoint Sampler
I imagine Emma on a winter night, an eight-year-old curled fireside in a wing chair, proving her skill with weeping willows...
Psychiatry Comic: Deciphering Voices
What is more concerning? The voices in his head or not being able to decipher them without a hearing aid?
Jolly Ranchers
They sulk and swear when I say, “Sorry, no Jollies,” tune out when I lecture about sugar, acid, and tooth decay- they’ve known sweetness and want more....
The Magistrates
My musician patient in a fetal curl, Tchaikovsky’s “Meditation” plays an endless loop against this climate controlled conspiracy of monitors and machines...
Psychiatry Comic: Couchaholism
Laziness or disease? You decide.
All the World’s Notes
The moment the maestro flicks his baton, an orchestra thunders and the pianist suffers a stroke. But everyone plays on...
Psychiatric Times’ Poet Awarded International Prestige
Congratulations and kudos to Dr Richard M. Berlin, whose poem “Eye Contact” was chosen to be included in the 2019 Hippocrates Prize Anthology.
Eye Contact
A ghostly glow frames the face of a man with nothing to hide...
Patient Interviewing 101
Always ask the name of their dog.
Looking for America
Winter had not yet fallen. A crimson tide of red leaves rained down from the heavens...
Psychiatry Comic: No Longer Kneaded
Occupational hazards in the world of a doughboy.
Conflict of Interest Form
They ask me to sign the moment before my poetry reading and I comply...
The Week the EMR Went Down
We fled the computer room like inmates after lightning fries the prison fence. Then we rounded with nurses who knew the doses and what made patients moan...
Overheard Conversation, ICU
Do I have to speak? I know you know...
Muses
I’ve been waiting for one of those nine bare-breasted sisters to land by my side and inspire a sonnet...
Monarchs and the President
The Monarch’s cortex, head of a pin, contains maps of Earth and heavens within...
Listening to Dead Patients
They love to talk like air traffic controllers: “Angle the spinal needle 20 degrees and push gently toward the midline.” And though I don’t say “Roger”...
Ordinary Mornings
Homeless men in Chinatown doorways flick cigarettes and cough, while a dozen nurses forge into Beach Street winter...
Calling in the Script
Covering for a colleague I begin to startle after the tenth call-med refill requests, side effect questions, and suicidal thoughts...
Psychiatry Comic: Fall Rorschach Test
"Tell me what you see."
The Perfectionist
Rotten teeth, dirt creased face, he’d come in for a hot and a cot and collapsed with DTs...
Psychiatry Comic: Ego Massage
There's ego and there's ego.
The Hills of Paraguay
All summer southwest wind stirs the weeping willows the way my breath disturbs a settled life when I whisper the cancer diagnosis...
Yellow Warbler
Soaked in Mexican sunshine he’s powered back to the Berkshires, all the world’s yellow compressed into a firecracker...
The Tarts
I wanted this to be like a fairy tale walk in the woods before kids, careers, blood clots and bone mets...
Birthday Party
Green hills patched with April, snow and I’ve chosen to celebrate. with a full slate of patients.
The Juggler
After he juggles three chainsaws and spins twenty plates balanced on sticks, he moves to the grand finale: ten Bowler hats tossed across the arena and stacked on the ringmaster’s head.