Psych ER: Psychiatric Patients Come to the Emergency Room

Drawing on the experience of evaluating over 2000 emergency room patients, René Muller explores the important role of psychiatry in emergency room medicine. He discusses some of his most challenging cases, showing how psychiatry comes to the aid of medicine in managing the crises - real, imagined, and contrived - that are the everyday fare of clinicians who work in the ER. We are introduced to a world in which lies are exposed, manipulations revealed, diagnoses made, medications adjusted, and even very brief psychotherapy attempted. Muller begins with patient narratives rooted in the mental disorders most commonly encountered in the ER: Depression, panic disorder, drug dependence, bipolar depression, bipolar mania, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's dementia. These stories pave the way for more puzzling ER cases, which Muller gathers into sections of "Veiled and Bizarre Stories" and "Stories with a Medical Component." He introduces us to the meanings of ER malingering and offers hard-won insights into managing "dumps" (when patients are dumped into the ER by families, police, doctors) and "stumbles" (when patients' bizarre behavior lands them in the ER). The stories patients tell - and the questions these stories raise - drive Muller's text. A young man has seriously overdosed, but with what? Why has a successfully medicated schizophrenic suddenly begun hearing voices again? And what are we to make of a patient who is willing to risk death attempting to "drown" his hiccups by drinking up to 12 liters of fluid a day? For these and equally fascinating questions, Muller is a sure-handed guide, working his way through one ER challenge after another with psychiatric acumen and a balanced appreciation of the medical, custodial, socioeconomic, and legal dimensions of ER work. An intriguing account of the competing agendas that enter into the handling of emergencies, Psych ER is also a compilation of evocative patient stories about the subjective experience of being ill.

Psych ER

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Muller, René J.

Mental Health

Routledge

The prospect that the psychiatric profession has hurt rather than helped many of its patients is incredibly disheartening; however, wrong diagnoses and improper treatment are all too common errors within the field. Author René Muller presents a revealing look into how psychiatry has failed a great majority of patients, all the while recognizing the valiant efforts made by psychiatrists who maintain their integrity and serve their patients well. The result is an enlightening critique of the profession―one that pits criticism of psychiatry's current biological reduction and exaggerated promises against the accumulated wisdom of a profession that has struggled for a century and a half to understand and help those with mental illness.

Doing Psychiatry Wrong

Alembics: Baltimore sketches, etc

Icarus Books

Trump's Pathological Presidency: A Malignant Narcissist Subverts Truth, Justice and the American Way

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Independently published

The Four Domains of Mental Illness

The Four Domains of Mental Illness presents an authentic and valid alternative to the DSM-5, which author René J. Muller argues has resulted in many patients being incorrectly diagnosed and wrongly medicated. Dr. Muller points out where the DSM-5 is mistaken and offers a guide to diagnosis based on the psychobiology of psychiatrist Adolf Meyer and the insights of existential philosophy and psychiatry. His model identifies the phenomena of the mental illnesses that clinicians most often see, which are characterized by identifying their structure, or partial structure. Using the FDMI approach, clinicians can grasp how each mental illness is an aberration of Martin Heidegger’s being-in-the-world.

The Four Domains of Mental Illness: An Alternative to the DSM-5

The prospect that the psychiatric profession has hurt rather than helped many of its patients is incredibly disheartening; however, wrong diagnoses and improper treatment are all too common errors within the field. Author Ren�uller presents a revealing look into how psychiatry has failed a great majority of patients, all the while recognizing the valiant efforts made by psychiatrists who maintain their integrity and serve their patients well. The result is an enlightening critique of the profession�one that pits criticism of psychiatry's current biological reduction and exaggerated promises against the accumulated wisdom of a profession that has struggled for a century and a half to understand and help those with mental illness.

Doing Psychiatry Wrong: A Critical and Prescriptive Look at a Faltering Profession

Identification of the phenomenon of marginality in The Marginal Self--the failure to become one's authentic, best self, by refusing to actualize this potential that is inherent in us all--turns on recognizing that freedom, and its misuse, underlie most human behavior, normal and pathological. Jean-Paul Sartre insisted that people don't just have freedom, they are freedom. Most philosophical anthropologies, including Freudian psychoanalysis, and the current medical model of mental illness propagated by the American Psychiatric Association and typified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), do not acknowledge this essential reality. Beyond Marginality came out first eleven years after the initial 1987 publication of The Marginal Self. The author, in the meantime, had become acquainted with the Zen philosophy of D. T. Suzuki, of whom Martin Heidegger said that if he understood this man's work correctly, Suzuki had accomplished what Heidegger had been trying to do all his life. What did Heidegger see in Suzuki's anthropology? That the Cartesian duality--ultimately the dissociation of our inner lives from the world around us and from one another--was a distortion created by us that we could overcome through Zen's actionable intuition of human wholeness. How this overcoming might be brought about is the theme of Beyond Marginality, starting with Suzuki's intuition and embracing the work of many allied thinkers. Equally compelling are vivid testimonials from those who had stumbled into marginality, some eventually recognizing the negative consequences of their misused freedom, then freely willing themselves out of their marginal states. Helping people move beyond marginality and its attendant psychic pathology parallels the present enthusiasm of the mental health community for a positive psychology. Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin left us with the counter-Cartesian, Zen-like insight that nothing is so practical as a good theory.

Beyond Marginality: Constructing a Self in the Twilight of Western Culture

Humanities Press

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Books by Muller, René J.