Join us for a fascinating interview with Anne Buist and Graeme Simsion, authors of the Menzies Mental Health series – i.e. The Glass House (book 1) and The Oasis (book 2). We have a lot to talk about including the complexity of the Australian mental health care system, balancing technical accuracy and storytelling, and telling the lived experience of healthcare professionals while also prioritising the rights of people living with complex mental health conditions.
Listen here, or on your favourite pod player.
Click here for content notes
inpatient hospital settings, burnout, involuntary treatment, burnout of medical professionals, stigma and discrimination facing people living with mental ill-health.
Show Notes
About the latest novel in the Menzies Mental Health series
Trainee psychiatrist Doctor Hannah Wright has only just got her head above water in the acute psychiatric ward at Menzies Hospital when she’s thrown into the deep end of the outpatient clinic. Keen to develop her skills in talking therapies, she finds herself up against a boss who’s focused on medication and a senior colleague with a score to settle.
While Hannah comes under pressure to seek therapy herself to confront a traumatic past, her patients’ health issues range from OCD to ice addiction, childhood abuse to the mental impact of ageing, and from bad parenting to bad genes. They all come to the Oasis.
What she discovers is altogether more complicated.
The Glass House and The Oasis are out now through Hachette Publishing.
About the Authors
Graeme Simsion is the internationally bestselling author of The Rosie Project, The Rosie Effect, The Rosie Result and The Best of Adam Sharp.
Anne Buist is the author of the psychological thrillers Medea’s Curse, Dangerous to Know, This I Would Kill For and The Long Shadow, and Professor of Women’s Mental Health at the University of Melbourne
Anne and Graeme have co-authored Two Steps Forward and Two Steps Onward, and live together in in Melbourne, Australia.
We have previously interviewed Graeme about the legacy of The Rosie Project, and Anne about her book Locked Ward, so please check out those episodes!
Their book recommendations include:
- Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison
- Late Bloomer by Clem Bastow
- The Cop Who Fell To Earth by Craig Semple
- Because I’m Not Myself, You See by Ariane Beeston (PS. listen to our interview with Ariane here!)
- My Friend Fox by Heidi Everett
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We record our podcast on Wurundjeri Land, which is home to both of us in Naarm/Melbourne. We also acknowledge the role of storytelling in First Nations communities. Always was, always will be Aboriginal Land.
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