Mark Hoerr:  

Life This is difficult because these bios tend to be a platform for displaying your achievements. What I have to display is not very shiny. Before I went to Oberlin, I worked at the Cleveland Free Clinic as Clinic Coordinator and Janitor. The Clinic was a converted Frat House. It was a "shifted 60's" experience which. in part directied me to go to medical school at CWRU after a year as a lab tech in a medical research lab. The other part was that my dad was the chief of surgery and chairman of the board of directors at the Cleveland Clinic and, being the youngest, I was the last chance to continue the family "medical tradition." I thought that becoming a psychiatrist would be a compromise between the pressure to become a doctor and my interest in mystical religions and that I would complete medical school feeling competent and enlightened. That was wrong. I've been a commuinity psychiatrist for the last 18 years. My patients are indigent, with a high percentage of concurrent personality disorders and substance abuse. I see outpatients and involuntarily committed inpatients. Over the years, I have had to work longer hours, do more paperwork, deal with an unexpected number of psychiatrist bosses who are sociaopaths. My work hours have consistently gone up and my standard of living has gone down. I like the work for the most part but I'm too tired and have too many problems of my own to have much of a social life. One of my first patients was a high school classmate from Cleveland who somehow managed to get admitted to me as a resident. Im my first goup session, he said he had the delusion that his doctor was a highschool classmate. I apologized to him that I hadn't been able to talk to him before, but he wasn't delusional. Later, on rounds with my supervisor, we entered his room. My supervisor intimidated even the residents. He stared at my classmate who looked very anxious, turned to me and said, "whatever he's on, he needs more of it." After...Expand for more