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pills. (“You do the hard work of getting people to be medication compliant,” a psychiatry resident said to me once, in the patronizing tone I would become accustomed to hearing from young psychiatrists, as if this were a skill that one might reasonably spend many years in school acquiring.) The sensible idea that the sum total of one’s biology
and
life experiences contributed to emotional strengths and vulnerabilities seemed to vanish into air, and along with it esteem for the actual hard work done by psychologists. And so it came to pass that my discipline was slowly being phased out of medical centers—the treatment site of choice for the most disturbed and outcast patients. By the time I completed my four years of doctoral course work and accepted the internship offered me at Kings County Hospital, there were fourteen psychiatrists running and medicating the seven adult inpatient units. There were four psychologists in total covering those wards. Even in the place where I had been invited to complete my training, there was this suggestion of how little what I had to offer might be valued. For my own part, I couldn’t quite get that message out of my mind.

    On the first morning of my internship at Kings County Hospital my stomach felt raw. My new professional clothes, so chic in Macy’s dressing room just one month before, looked now only dowdy and overly beige. I met my friend Jen on the corner of Joralemon and Court Streets, halfway between our Brooklyn apartments—mine in tree-lined Brooklyn Heights, where I was renting a small fifth-floor walk-up withmy classmate turned fiancé, George; Jen’s in a grittier, hipper neighborhood just the other side of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. We met near the Court Street station to ride the Number 2 train out to the far end of our borough, to East Flatbush, where our Jewish immigrant relatives might have settled just two or three generations prior, but which was now home to other, darker-skinned newcomers: Haitians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Guyanese. It was less than five miles from where I’d lived for years, but until I interviewed at the hospital, I’d never as much as passed through the neighborhood. In a city of destinations, East Flatbush was not one at all.
    Jen, as of that day my fellow intern, had been my friend for six years, since we’d met in a group therapy class when beginning the master’s degrees that we hoped would make us competitive doctoral applicants. We worked in the same research lab, and though she thought of herself as painfully shy, we’d slipped straightaway into an effortless friendship. I grew so attached to her during the two years of our M.A. work that I cried when we didn’t get into the same Ph.D. program. “Maybe we’ll go on internship together,” she said at the time, trying to cheer me. But internship was far off enough then to be only an abstraction, and winding up with Jen seemed unlikely besides. With so many different sites in New York City alone, it was doubtful we would pick the same one, let alone that one would agree upon us. But as we had discussed our respective preference lists just before Match Day that past February, it turned out that both of us—ready for a gritty challenge—had put Kings County in slot number two. Both of us had been certain we wouldn’t get the other public hospitals that had been our first picks.
    Jen’s clothing that morning matched mine, in broad sweeps, and looked equally as labored. We had to appear professionalnow, business casual. Even the moniker was unattractive. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
    “Ambivalent,” I answered as we chose seats on the near-empty subway car of our reverse commute. Jen smiled, which I’d known she would do because it was a psych-grad-student inside half joke, the obligatorily measured response of one under constant press to demonstrate how in touch she is with her mixed feelings. In actuality, I was more rueful than anything. While we were