Crazy all the time

the long version

Crazy All the Time is the story of psychotherapy in the real world. Dr. Frederick L. Covan, chief psychologist at Bellevue Hospital, offers a vivid portrait - compassionate, insightful, and humorous - of life on the inside of the combat zone that is the psych ward. In this colorful and irresistibly readable book he tracks the progress of a group of psychology interns who confront an array of patients from paranoid schizophrenics to self-mutilators and suicidal adolescents. These are the accounts of everyday trials by fire, where cases unfold with wildly unpredictable turns, where each intern regularly faces the chasm that separates the world of academic theory from the messy lives of actual patients. With an acute wit and penetrating sense of human nature, Dr. Covan guides the progress of these interns as they wrestle with fascinating cases - whether it is Brenda, a middle-aged woman who believes she has had sexual relations with the last five presidents of the United States and challenges her therapist's notions about the bridges we all build between public and private lives; or Sid, who swallows glass and razor blades and is either a petty criminal or a desperate young man calling for help; or Matthew, who performs the seemingly inexplicable act of cutting off his own penis.