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"Nursing Home Doctors"
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Key Takeaways
- Richard Berlin transitioned from consultation-liaison psychiatry to geriatric psychiatry, influenced by his work with elderly patients.
- His poem, "Nursing Home Doctors," narrates an encounter with a former colleague who became a patient.
"I say Good Morning! and he studies me in my white coat, like skin lesion he has seen only once in a textbook."
Any Good Poem
Richard Berlin, MD, shares his poem, "Nursing Home Doctors," featured in the November 2024 issue of Psychiatric Times.
Berlin started out his psychiatric career as a consultation-liaison psychiatrist, providing psychiatric care to hospitalized patients with severe medical and psychiatric disorders. His patients tended to be elderly, and when the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology created a new board certification of “added qualifications in geriatric psychiatry,” Berlin took the very first exam, passed, and received certificate #32, which then led him to work as a nursing home psychiatrist. This poem is a story about his interaction with a former colleague turned patient.
Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 26 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.
