Lately, there have been a couple of movies that remind me of what it’s like to be a Psychiatrist, even though they ostensibly have nothing to do with Psychiatry at all.  I wrote about Inception a little while ago, and how the premise of the movie has analogies to the practice of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy.   This time, I’ll talk about Up In The Air. In Up In The Air, George Clooney plays a man (who I’ll just call George from now on, because I can’t remember the character’s actual name) who flies around the country to fire people whose bosses are too scared to fire their employees themselves.  He works for a mercenary employee terminating company.  Pretty terrible, right?  When I tell you that his job really reminded me from…

I'm looking forward to reading the book Henry's Demons which I heard about listening to the BBC today.  Henry Cockburn and his father Patrick (a journalist), co-authored a book telling the story of Henry's experience with schizophrenia.  The writing of this book turned out to be a very therapeutic for Henry, who enjoys writing.  It was only after he began writing about his experiences that he was able to participate more fully in his treatment. I expect this book will be a very interesting read, both because Henry and his father seem to have a gift with words, and can explain his experiences very well, but also because Henry has some insight into his condition. "Insight" is a word we use in Psychiatry to specifically refer to a persons ability to…