The Comfort Garden: Tales from the Trauma Unit

The Comfort Garden: Tales from the Trauma Unit

In this book, Laurie Barkin explores "Who will care for caregivers? The Comfort Garden: Tales from the Trauma Unit is a Book of the Year winner at the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) and a Nautilus award. The story is Laurie Barkin’s account of the five years she worked as a psychiatric nurse on the surgical/trauma unit at San Francisco General Hospital. Told against the backdrop of patients who survived motor vehicle accidents, falls, fires, fists, bullets, and knives, The Comfort Garden is a metaphor for the emotional support caregivers need. The story illuminates the issues of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma that may develop in caregivers when exposure to tragedy becomes routine. The Comfort Garden will appeal to health care professionals, firefighters, police, war veterans, social workers, journalists, students, and anyone whose life is touched by trauma. “The Comfort Garden reveals the real world ofhuman-to-human caring at its highest level.” — Jean Watson, RN, PhD, author of Human Caring Science: A Theory of Nursing “Laurie is that rare health professional with a gift for narrative and a story to tell. This is an important book for any health care worker, but especially for those of us who consider ourselves traumatic stress specialists. It reinforces the values and the spirit that brought us into the field. And it reminds us of the obstacles we face every day: human cruelty, social injustice, dwindling resources. Read this. You’ll be better for it.” — Frank M Ochberg MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Michigan State University Laurie Barkin “sensitively documents the process of vicarious trauma — how caregivers like herself internalize their patients' trauma.” — San Francisco Chronicle “In an age when hospitals have been turning to quicker-acting medications, faster discharges, and fewer deep and meaningful conversationswith patients, Laurie Barkin takes the opposite position. She urges us to make the time to use our knowledge of psychodynamic psychotherapy to help traumatized people early in the course of their distress.” — Lenore Terr MD, psychiatrist, author of Too Scared to Cry “Whenever we walk into a hospital or a doctor’s office we often assume that the patients are somehow broken, sick or frightened andthat the nurses and doctors are whole, healthy and brave. In stories that prove these assumptions false, Laurie Barkin shows us how permeable the line actually is between the cared for and the caregiver.” — Cortney Davis, author of The Heart’s Truth: Essays on the Art of Nursing “In an age when hospitals have been turning to quicker-acting medications, faster discharges, and fewer deep and meaningful conversationswith patients, Laurie Barkin takes the opposite position. She urges us to make the time to use our knowledge of psychodynamic psychotherapy to help traumatized people early in the courseof their distress.” — Lenore Terr MD, psychiatrist,author of Too Scared to Cry "The Comfort Garden is filled with authentic moments that are both caring and healing. Embracing life, the author helps herself and her patients re-pattern traumatic experiences. Inspiring and painful at the same time, The Comfort Garden reveals the real world of human-to-human caring at its highest level. This work shows how the route toward emotional healing transcends medical technology and lies within a patient's inner experience."-Nurse theorist Jean Watson, author of Human Caring Science: A Theory of Nursing "This is an important book for any health care worker, but especially for those of us who consider ourselves traumatic stress specialists. It reinforces the values and the spirit that brought us into the field. And it reminds us of the obstacles we face every day: human cruelty, social injustice, dwindling resources. Laurie is no Pollyanna. She is realistic and she suffers from vicarious trauma. But she copes and learns and survives and uplifts her fellow travelers. Read this. You'll be better for it."-Frank M Ochberg MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Michigan State University "In an age when hospitals have been turning to quicker-acting medications, faster discharges, and fewer deep and meaningful conversations with patients, Laurie Barkin takes the opposite position. She urges us to make the time to use our knowledge of psychodynamic psychotherapy to help traumatized people early in the course of their distress."-Lenore Terr MD, psychiatrist, author of Too Scared to Cry Long after I left my job on the trauma unit at SFGH, my patients' voices and their stories were still clamoring in my head. I had a strong feeling that their stories needed to be told and that the clamoring wouldn't stop until I wrote them down. On rare occasions, a book appears in print that has the capacity to captivate and to deeply touch the soul of the reader. Such books emerge from an author whose motivation for writing comes from experience with life-altering events and the need to tell the story of these events is bo