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Brooklyn Zoo

The Education of a Psychotherapist

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
A compelling memoir of a psychotherapist’s clinical and personal education amid chaos and dysfunction that delivers an emotional impact to rival Susan Sheehan’s classic Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

Seven years after her college graduation, Darcy Lockman abandoned a career in magazine journalism to become a psychologist. After four years in classrooms, she spent her final training year at the Kings County Hospital, an aging public institution on the outskirts of Brooklyn. When she started, little did she know that the hospital’s behavioral health department—the infamous G Building, where the Son of Sam serial killer David Berkowitz and the rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard once resided—was on the cusp of its darkest era yet, one that culminated in the death of a patient in a psychiatric emergency room described by the New York Post as a “Dickensian nightmare.”
Brooklyn Zoo unfolds amid the constant drama and disorder of the G Building. Lockman rotates through four departments, each of which presents new challenges and haunting cases. She works with forensic psychologists to evaluate offenders for fitness to stand trial—almost all of them with pathos-filled histories and little hope of rehabilitation. The thorny politics of the psych ER compound her anxiety about working with its volatile patients, but under the wing of a charismatic if brusque mentor she gains a deeper insight into her new profession as well as into her own strengths and limitations.

As she moves to the inpatient ward and then psychiatric consultation liaison, Lockman’s overstretched supervisors and the institutional preference for pills over therapy are persistent obstacles. But they eventually present a young clinician with the opportunity to reexamine everything she believes and to come out stronger on the other side.
Lockman’s frank portrayal of her fledgling role in a warped system is a professional coming-of-age story that will resonate with anyone who has fought to develop career mastery in a demanding environment. A stark portrait of the struggling public mental-health-care system, Brooklyn Zoo is also an homage to the doctors who remain committed to their patients in spite of institutional failures and to the patients who strive to get better with their help. And it is an inspiring first-hand account by a narrator who triumphs over self-doubt to believe in the rightness and efficacy of her chosen profession.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 9, 2012
      Clinical psychologist and journalist Lockman writes about her intern year at Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital, detailing her rotations in forensic psychology, the psych. emergency room, an inpatient unit, and as a “consultation liaison” with medical staff. She captures the hopeless dreariness of the place—the inpatient unit is “a large stale-smelling place with... cold white concrete floors and rusty-paned windows that did not open.” Above all, Lockman illustrates how difficult it is to engage patients with serious psychiatric illnesses. She asks one patient about her sleep and appetite—possible signs of mental disorder—and the patient responds, “You’re a nosy one, aren’t you?” Lockman is candid about her frustrations (and all too occasional small triumphs) with patients, as well as with absent or burned-out supervisors. She says that psychological insights were often trumped by psychiatry’s biomedical model. Although crisply written, there are too many brief interactions with too many patients, perhaps reflecting the nature of the work. Exemplified by a reference to “my masochistic defenses,” she sometimes alludes to her own psychological dynamics without adequately explaining her personal interactions. Still, this is a useful, sometimes memorable, look at the vagaries of a psychologist’s training and role in an overwhelming institutional setting. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House.

    • Kirkus

      June 1, 2012
      The challenges facing a psychotherapist during a yearlong internship in a New York City public hospital. Based on her own positive experience in psychoanalysis, Lockman pursued an education in the psychoanalytic tradition, which included supervised therapy with clients, one of whom she saw over a three-year period. She explains that this put her at odds with the mainstream of the profession today because of "the pernicious hostility toward the psychoanalytical way of working," which often dismisses psychological problems as "nothing more than chemical occurrences in the brain." She chronicles her initial frustration with her inability to put her education and skills to good use and her dawning understanding that the chaotic conditions at the hospital often made her skills irrelevant anyway. Her patients constantly struggled with the brutal conditions of inner-city life, job loss, random violence and more. The author eventually realized that the most important gift she could give them was her willingness to listen to their concerns and treat them with respect, while evaluating whether they should be released or sent to long-term care. Her internship included forensics (the determination of whether a prisoner was mentally fit to stand trial), different stages in the intake procedure, and consultations with doctors treating medical patients who seemed disturbed. Lockman remains convinced that along with the socioeconomic problems that place limitations on the treatment offered to mental patients in public hospitals, the medicalization of mental illness is also at fault. Before returning to graduate school Lockman worked as a magazine journalist, a skill she puts to good use in this insider's look at the practice of psychiatry in a poorly funded, understaffed public institution.

      COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Library Journal

      March 15, 2012

      In 2007, psychologist and freelance magazine writer Lockman began her yearlong internship at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, barely a month after the New York Post broke a story about the hospital's "Dickensian" conditions. In this debut memoir about her training there, she marvels at the counterintuitive practices in place in the G Building, Kings's inpatient adult psychiatric center, where a lack of supervision, resources, and even working elevator call buttons are a matter of course. Readers follow Lockman's rotations through inpatient, psych ER, forensic psychology, and consultation-liaison psychiatry. Though lively details do emerge--a female patient, hiding in a restroom garbage pail, terrifies a male patient who sees "her intense little eyes peering over the top"--Lockman's tone is grudging. She's more animated when railing against the hospital's "strong ambivalence about psychology," psychoanalysis in particular, than its "culture of offhand neglect." VERDICT Neither a moving personal history nor a crusading insider's look into a broken system, Lockman's book lacks that certain storyteller's spark. In the end, her patients spin better tales.--Molly McArdle, Library Journal

      Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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