You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here: A Psychiatrist’s Life

Humane, hilarious and heart-breaking, You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here is an enlightening and darkly comic window into the world of psychiatry

Humane, hilarious and heart-breaking – an enlightening and darkly comic window into the world of psychiatry

‘Very funny and deeply sympathetic. Really excellent’
HENRY MARSH, author of Do No Harm

‘This is honestly my dream book. Both fascinating and bleakly funny’
FERN BRADY, author of Strong Female Character

‘Honest, funny, saddening and uplifting all rolled into one’
JO BRAND, comedian and former psychiatric nurse

A woman in a wedding dress arrives at the hospital looking for Harry Styles.

A lorry driver with schizophrenia believes he’s got a cure for coronavirus.

A depressed man hides his profession from his GP due to stigma.

Most of the psychiatric cases in this book are his patients. Some of them are family. One of them is him.

Unlocking the doors to the psych ward, NHS psychiatrist Dr Benji Waterhouse provides a fly-on-the-padded-wall account of medicine’s most mysterious and controversial speciality.

Why would anyone in their right mind choose to be a psychiatrist? Are the solutions to people’s messy lives really within medical school textbooks? And how can vulnerable patients receive the care they need when psychiatry lacks staff, hospital beds and any actual cures?

You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here explores these complicated questions from both sides of the doctor’s desk.

This is the perfect read for fans of This Is Going to Hurt, Unnatural Causes and The Prison Doctor.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
Imprint: Jonathan Cape UK
Publication date: 16/05/2024