Reviews tagging 'Mental illness'

The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder by Charles Graeber

4 reviews

daniellekat's review

challenging dark slow-paced

2.5

I'm having a hard time rating this since the "story" was interesting but I think the pacing of the book took away from my enjoyment of reading this. I felt like the author didn't have a strong focus for the narrative they put together. The book seemed like a jumble of details roughly organized in chronological order but lacked...something. I'm not even sure exactly what I wanted more of, cohesiveness maybe? The second part's focus on Amy was fantastic but it drove me crazy at how many times she was referred to as the "girl". It was hard to tell how many of these and other strange wording choices were the author's or directly from source material. 

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Mental illness, Self harm, Suicidal thoughts, Medical content, Medical trauma, Stalking, Suicide attempt, and Murder

Moderate: Alcoholism and Toxic friendship

Minor: Child abuse, Sexual assault, Police brutality, and Pregnancy

fkshg8465's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative mysterious sad tense medium-paced

4.0

The why is going to haunt me for a long time. Clearly, the man was mentally unhinged, but what makes me so angry is the complicity of the hospitals. They suspected but didn’t care…Grrr…I feel so sorry for his kids…

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Death, Infidelity, Mental illness, Self harm, Sexual assault, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, Grief, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, Murder, Pregnancy, Fire/Fire injury, and Gaslighting

jhbandcats's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark informative mysterious sad medium-paced

4.0

I initially had a really hard time reading this because I got so frustrated and angry. The book is well-written, well-researched, and fascinating. My problem was that the medical profession - both the hospital administrators and the licensing people - allowed him to kill so many people, perhaps as many as 400, over a period of SIXTEEN YEARS without doing anything to stop him. The structures that should’ve been keeping people safe were complete failures, and the administrations only cared about liability, not patient safety. 

The book is divided into two halves - the first is about the sixteen years of murder and the second is about the police investigation. That keeps the events understandable although Cullen was in so many facilities - he kept having to move between hospitals and nursing homes as he’d fall under suspicion - that it’s really difficult to keep it all straight. The police investigation and the writing of this book were a confusing tangle and both succeeded only by focusing on discrete sections at a time. 

An excellent entry in true crime and the smaller subset of medical murder, but a horrific indictment of the medical profession as a whole. 

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Alcoholism, Bullying, Death, Gore, Infidelity, Mental illness, Sexual assault, Blood, Vomit, Medical content, Medical trauma, Suicide attempt, and Murder

clarabooksit's review

dark informative fast-paced

3.75

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Alcoholism, Death, Mental illness, Medical content, Medical trauma, Stalking, Suicide attempt, and Murder

Moderate: Body horror, Bullying, and Death of parent

Minor: Child abuse, Pedophilia, and Violence