You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

A woman with bipolar flies from America in a wedding dress to marry Harry Styles.
A lorry driver with schizophrenia believes he’s got a cure for coronavirus.
A depressed psychiatrist hides his profession from his GP due to stigma.

Most of the characters in this book are his patients. Some of them are his 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?

Humane, hilarious and heart-breaking, You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here is an enlightening and darkly comic medical memoir - from both sides of the doctor’s desk.

This is the perfect read for fans of This Is Going to Hurt, Unnatural Causes and The Prison Doctor.

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

©2024 Benji Waterhouse (P) 2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

Darkly amusing and touching… It gives you an alarming insight into the chaotic lives of both patients and medical staff.

*Waterstones Favourite Reads of 2024*

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*

It has a freshness and verve that sets it apart… What is unwavering and beautifully described is the inspiration Waterhouse continues to find in his patients. He has that essential trait of all good doctors: a sincere and lasting tenderness for his flawed and frail, crude and complicated, broken and brilliant fellow human beings… Ultimately, this is a campaigning work, both brilliantly funny and deadly serious…. His book is humane, hilarious, eye-opening – and deserves to be widely read

Guardian

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

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