Title: The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrist’s Reflections on Healing in a Changing World
Author: Dora Calott Wang
Publisher: Riverhead
Publication Date: April 29, 2010
Hardcover: 368 pages
ISBN: 978-1594487538
Genre: Memoir

About the Book:

Dora Calott Wang is a Yale-trained psychiatrist who began her career as a doctor with great enthusiasm. But after less than a decade of her practicing medicine, that enthusiasm was shattered by the seismic shifts that shook the entire medical profession.

Once a cherished, even sacred, vocation, medicine has become a business driven by profit. What made medicine turn its back on its central tenets? In The Kitchen Shrink, Wang explores what happened, through the prism of her own research and experience. In these pages we watch as she struggles to maintain her professional standards as health care’s priorities shift away from the compassionate care of patients and, instead, toward improving the bottom line, and along the way we meet some of her patients, whose stories reveal an oft-ignored human side of our besieged system. As the medical landscape shifts beneath Wang, she confronts depression and exhaustion, and fights to find a balance between work and home, as it become ever clearer that she cannot untangle the uncertain futures of her patients from her own.

Part memoir and part rallying cry, The Kitchen Shrink is an unflinchingly honest, passionate, and humane inside look at the realities of free-market medicine in today’s America.

My Review:

Thought-provoking, The Kitchen Shrink by Dora Calott Wang is a look at the changing, oftentimes for the worse, field of medicine.  Wang ‘s memoir details how she began her career with enthusiasm and soon the realities of health care for profit had changed the way medical professionals are to treat their patients.  A shocking and thought-stimulating memoir, Wang takes the reader into her life explaining the struggles she as a psychiatrist faces with knowing what a patient may need verses what insurance will allow.  The Kitchen Shrink is more than a memoir about one doctor’s experience, it is a wake-up call to society to take notice of the lack of care, the high medical premiums, and the sudden push of medication instead of therapy.  I recommend The Kitchen Shrink to anyone interested in medical care or to those who merely enjoy memoirs.

About the Author:

Dora Calott Wang, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. A graduate of the Yale School of Medicine and the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, she received her M.A. in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been the recipient of a writer’s residency from the Lannan Foundation. Her memoir, The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrist’s Reflections on Healing in a Changing World was published by Riverhead Books, The Penguin Group.

I received a complimentary copy of The Kitchen Shrink by Dora Calott Wang, M.D. from FSB Associates. Receiving a review copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned novel.