Sometimes Amazing Things Happen: Heartbreak and Hope on the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Prison Ward Audiobook (Free)

Elizabeth Ford went through medical school unsure of where she belonged. It wasn’t until she did her psychiatry rotation that she found her calling-to care for probably one of the most vulnerable populations of emotionally ill people, the inmates of NY City’s jails, including Rikers Island, who are so sick that they are sent to the Bellevue Medical center Jail Ward for treatment.

These men were damaged, without resources or support, and very ill. They may be violent, unpredictable, but they may be about Occasionally Amazing Items Happen: Heartbreak and Hope in the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Prison Ward funny and tender and needy. Mainly, they were individual and they awakened in Ford a boundless empathy. Her sufferers made her a great doctor and an improved person.

While Ford was a psychiatrist at Bellevue she became a wife and a mom. In her publication she shares her challenges to stability her personal and professional lives, to look after her children and her sufferers, and to keep up with the empathy that is essential to her practice-all in the face of a complex institution, an exhausting workload, and the deeply emotionally taxing nature of her function.

Ford brings laughter, grace, and humanity to the lives from the sufferers in her treatment and in beautifully rendered prose illuminates the internal workings (and failings) of our mental health and offender justice systems.