You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here

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What to expect

A humane, hilarious and heart-breaking window into the world of psychiatry from ‘the Adam Kay of mental healthcare’ (THE TIMES)

'Very funny and deeply sympathetic. Really excellent' HENRY MARSH

'This is honestly my dream book. Both fascinating and bleakly funny' FERN BRADY

‘Honest, funny, saddening and uplifting all rolled into one’ JO BRAND

A woman in a wedding dress arrives at the hospital looking for Harry Styles.

A lorry driver with schizophrenia believes he’s got a cure for coronavirus.

A depressed man hides his profession from his GP due to stigma.

Most of the psychiatric cases in this book are his patients. Some of them are family. One of them is him.

Unlocking the doors to the psych ward, NHS psychiatrist Dr Benji Waterhouse provides a fly-on-the-padded-wall account of medicine’s most mysterious and controversial speciality.

Why would anyone in their right mind choose to be a psychiatrist? Are the solutions to people’s messy lives really within medical school textbooks? And how can vulnerable patients receive the care they need when psychiatry lacks staff, hospital beds and any actual cures?

You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here explores these complicated questions from both sides of the doctor’s desk.

Critics Review

  • Hilarious, shocking and urgent… a deeply compassionate book, which paints a picture of professional dedication in the face of almost unbelievable dysfunction

    The Times, *Book of the Week*

  • Humorous and humane … [Waterhouse] finds the funny without turning patients into punchlines… It’s a warm-hearted reminder that the [NHS] system is still staffed by many people doing their darnedest to connect with and care for people

    Sunday Telegraph

  • Funny, humane and insightful

    i news

  • A darkly comic personal trawl through the world of psychiatry and the idiosyncratic characters struggling on both sides of the divide. Honest, funny, saddening and uplifting all rolled into one

    Jo Brand, comedian and former psychiatric nurse

  • Very funny and deeply sympathetic. Really excellent

    Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm

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