Welcome to My Country

A psychologist whose empathy with her patients is tempered by her own bout of treated mental disability takes readers into encounters with her dysfunctional clients. With disarming candor, she allows her voice to mingle with those of her patients--schizophrenics, borderline personalities, bulimics and others--in an inner-city residential unit. Slater traces the early years of her career, expressing her belief in the transforming power of love, and she shares with readers the almost imperceptible changes in her patients' feelings that her intimacy with them brings about. As she interviews a patient in the very place where she herself was once incarcerated, the author ponders anew the mystery of why she ``managed somehow to leave behind at least for now what looks like wreckage, and shape something solid from life,'' while others have not. This debut book opens a vista on emotional and mental distress. First serial to Harper's; author tour. (Feb.)