How Do You Feel?: One Doctor’s Search for Humanity in Medicine

Psychiatrist Gold discusses how she neglected her own mental health while caring for others at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in her touching and raw debut. Long considered a close listener and empathetic friend, Gold found psychiatric medicine a natural fit. Over the years, however, she came to realize that her focus on others was “as much a way to distract myself from my own feelings and struggles as... an act of selflessness and meaning.” She traces her journey toward better self-care and more stable mental health while providing a behind-the-curtain peek at the life of a therapist, sharing how she and her colleagues stay alert on off days and highlighting her work with several clients during the pandemic, including a medical resident who obsessively worried that he’d contract Covid and a nurse scarred by the death of one of her patients. Candidly illustrating both the hard work of talk therapy and the toll it can take on practitioners, Gold admirably exposes her own failings (she was late to several Zoom meetings and called patients by the wrong names during the peak of the pandemic). It’s an eye-opener. Agent: Kristin van Ogtrop, InkWell Management. (Oct.)