Sometimes Amazing Things Happen: Heartbreak and Hope on the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Prison Ward
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Elizabeth Ford went through medical school unsure of where she belonged. It wasn’t until she did her psychiatry rotation that she found her calling—to care for one of the most vulnerable populations of mentally ill people, the inmates of New York City’s jails, including Rikers Island, who are so sick that they are sent to the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward for care.
These men were broken, without resources or support, and very ill. They could be violent, unpredictable, but they could also be funny and tender and needy. Mostly, they were human and they awakened in Ford a boundless empathy. Her patients made her a great doctor and a better person.
While Ford was a psychiatrist at Bellevue she became a wife and a mother. In her book she shares her struggles to balance her personal and professional lives, to care for her children and her patients, and to maintain the empathy that is essential to her practice—all in the face of a complex institution, an exhausting workload, and the deeply emotionally taxing nature of her work.
Ford brings humor, grace, and humanity to the lives of the patients in her care and in beautifully rendered prose illuminates the inner workings (and failings) of our mental health and criminal justice systems.
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Elizabeth Ford, MD, is the chief of psychiatry for Correctional Health Services for New York City’s Health and Hospitals and a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. She is a recognized national expert in issues related to incarceration and mental illness and teaches extensively about these topics. She was formerly the director of forensic psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, specializing in the treatment of individuals with serious mental illness in the criminal justice system, and the director of the NYU Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship Training Program. She is the author of multiple peer-reviewed academic articles and book chapters, as well as the editor of Landmark Cases in Forensic Psychiatry, a book about seminal US Supreme Court cases related to psychiatry.
Bernadette Dunne has been honored to narrate the work of some of the finest fiction and nonfiction writers of our time, including Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Sandra Day O'Connor. The winner of more than a dozen Earphones Awards and a three-time Audie Award nominee, she has voiced countless bestsellers, including Memoirs of a Geisha, The Devil Wears Prada, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She studied at The Royal National Theater and lives in New York.
