Author Description

Trust and betrayal the divided self -- Medical school : skeletons, cadavers, Gray's anatomy and desensitisation -- An extreme state and a sense of pathway -- Research and metaphor : medical nemesis -- Completing medical school : examining reflexes -- Autonomy, invulnerability, and a commitment to service -- Losing sight of science and walking away from love -- Completing medical school. Training to be superhuman and joining the medical club -- The pleasant smell of aftershave and the imagined relief of not existing -- Worse than a nuclear winter -- Trust betrayed : confronting the devil -- Evolving from atheism : a spiritual emergency -- Defining the essence of psychiatry -- After Africa : rekindling passion for medicine and love -- Feeling lost in psychiatry and found in mothering -- Beginning to find my place in psychiatry -- Jumping through hoops and becoming a patient -- A herculean task : "hope and a future" -- Something wrong on the inside : the paradox -- Finding my voice ... and losing it again -- Side effects, spirituality, and finding my niche -- Disruption in meaning-making : the last extreme state -- Lighting a candle for justice -- Ways of making sense -- The re-covery model -- Living the experience of now : my life beyond psychiatry -- Becoming a psychiatrist : a pathway of impossible jobs -- My alternative training : pathway to becoming the psychiatrist I want to be -- Against all odds: maintaining my personal and professional identity -- Creative energy and 'the gift box'.