The third collaboration between husband and wife writing team, Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist, The Glass House gives us a behind the scenes look at the fictional Menzies Mental Health Service, from the perspective of its newest psychiatry registrar, Hannah Wright.
Told with the frankness and humour we’ve come to expect of the author of the ‘Rosie Project’ books, plus the specialised insight of eminent psychiatrist, Anne Buist, it’s a remarkable rendering of today’s mental health medical system, one that’s coming under ever-increasing pressures in our anxiety-ridden society.
Hannah is obliged to learn on the job as she’s confronted by an array of patients with complex mental health problems ranging from post-partum psychosis, anorexia nervosa to suicidal depression. As if these challenges aren’t enough, she’s thrown into a highly politicised
system where hierarchies are governed by all kinds of unspoken rules and her goal of admission into the specialist psychiatry training program is based, she learns, not so much on merit, as on the ability to placate the ego of the professor in charge.
Engagingly written, and very topical in its depiction of the fractured lens through which mental health is viewed by both laypersons, practitioners and patients themselves, this book will encourage you to see psychiatry in a new light. Hannah’s experiences are painful, often galling and humiliating, but vital for someone wanting to practise in the field. As she describes it ‘our patients’ problems are so complex, our treatments so crude, ourselves so human’.
Reviewed by Anne Green
Read a book review of The Oasis
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ABOUT THE AUTHORSAnne Buist is chair of Women’s Mental Health at the University of Melbourne and author of the psychological thrillers, Medea’s Curse, Dangerous to Know and This I Would Kill For.
Graeme Simsion is the internationally bestselling author of The Rosie Project, The Rosie Effect and The Best of Adam Sharp.
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