Christine Montross

Psychiatrist Christine Montross discusses the gripping patient encounters that have challenged and deepened her practice. In Falling into the Fire: A Psychiatrist’s Encounters with the Mind in Crisis, she looks at the grave human costs of mental illness and the challenges of diagnosis and treatment, and she confronts the larger question of psychiatry: What is to be done when a patient’s experiences cannot be accounted for, or helped, by what contemporary medicine knows about the brain?

Christine Montross, assistant professor of psychiatry at Brown University, is a practicing psychiatrist who focuses on the most severe cases. Her patients ingest knives, nails and lig...