Education of a Psychiatrist

Sheila Harms is Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University and practices as a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at McMaster Children's Hospital.

"A much-needed interrogation of the biological parameters imposed on knowledge about patient care. Attending to the transferences that take place in relations of care, Harms articulates new ways to make learning possible within psychiatry and mental health services. The Education of a Psychiatrist raises questions for education in general and medical education in particular, showing that how we learn can become a matter of life and death, for patients most of all but also, and crucially for the field of psychiatry, careers. This intervention is overdue." — A. C. Facundo, author of Oscillations of Literary Theory: The Paranoid Imperative and Queer Reparative"Sheila Harms offers us a uniquely hermeneutic and textured narrative of her own personal and professional transformations in becoming a psychiatrist, unfolding awkward moments of discomfort and the torsions of being educated by vulnerabilities. Harms does not shy away from challenging and sometimes viscerally painful encounters, exposing her own humanity and compassion by pressing herself firmly onto the page." — Allan Donsky, Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Calgary

• AcknowledgmentsPrelude: On Making Psychiatry an Educational Problem 1. Brittle Education2. Riding Pillion with Oliver Sacks3. A Psychiatrist's Body4. Hospital People5. Clinical Encounters of a Close Kind6. Beyond the Empirical Divide: A Way Out for New EducationReferencesIndex