"Nursing Home Doctors"

Author(s):

Richard M. Berlin, MD

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.
Berlin has contributed a monthly poem to Psychiatric Times for 26 years, exploring the doctor-patient experience.
His latest literary work, Tender Fences, continues to delve into the themes of medicine and poetry.

"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.