Breakdown: Exploring Mental Health, Relationships, and Suicide - Insights from a Harvard Psychiatrist | Understanding Depression, Anxiety, and Coping Strategies for College Students and Young Adults

This is an important book, not simply in its illustration of a respected doctor who seemingly became unmoored, but in some of her colleagues' hustling to spin the embarrassing news.It is the tragic story of psychiatry gone-haywire, a depressed Mexican-American Harvard medical student, Paul Lozano, unfortunately drawn into an infantilizing, eroticized treatment at the hands Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog in the late 80s and early 90s. Author Eileen McNamara carefully traces the tragic path toward Lozano's suicide and its highly publicized aftermath.Many questions will never be answered: did patient and psychiatrist actually have sex? Could this depressed patient have been saved under more ethical, skilled care? Was the treatment the cure, or did it provoke the disease? There was large evidence of an out-of-control therapist who damaged her patient through a distorted and sexually-provocative Mom-Boy relationship and mutual over-dependence.Beyond this specific case are the larger issues. Aspects of harmful therapy are offered at its source: a depiction of a doctor's rescue complex, her bunker mentality and her fantasy universe. This book also is a cautionary tale about the irresponsible side of mental health profession. For not only did this doctor rationalize her bizarre methodology and its mountains of artifacts, but many in her community rushed to defend her, hailing Bean-Bayog their victimized hero.Therapists sometimes can be so strangled by their own theory that they're myopic to the common sense. Study the photo of Bean-Bayog in semi-recline, slipped hips low on her chair, tenderly holding Dr. Bean Bear teddy to her breast. Her "professional" defenders even have a rationalization for that one.