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By Robert Klitzman
333 pp, $35
New York, NY, Oxford University Press, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-1953-2767-0

JAMA. 2008;299(17):2093-2094.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

At 8:30 AM on September 11, 2001, Robert Klitzman's sister called her best friend from her office on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center. No one ever heard from her again. In the following weeks, a grief-stricken Klitzman's body gave out. "For three months, I could not sleep . . . I could not get out of bed, and was no longer interested in reading books, seeing movies, or listening to music. Yet I was surprised when friends told me they thought I was depressed," writes Klitzman, a psychiatrist. His struggle with grief and depression inspired the work found in When Doctors Become Patients.

"For the first time, I fully appreciated what my patients had to undergo, and how hard it is to put the experience of depression into words," says Klitzman. To understand the experience of other physicians who become ill, he conducted in-depth interviews with 70 physicians. Initially focusing . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Preeti N. Malani, MD, MSJ, Reviewer
University of Michigan Health System
Veterans Affairs Healthcare System Ann Arbor
Ann Arbor
pmalani@umich.edu