How People Change

The technical and dry approach of psychiatric literature is often unfit to teach doctors how to connect to their patients' suffering because it privileges pathological categories over experience. Dr. Tucker turns to the conflicts of characters in short stories to restore the human dimension of medicine, and to entice practitioners to grasp the emotional layers of the particular situations in which their patients are entrapped. Physicians and medical students can turn to these narratives as examples of how others have dealt with challenges and debilitating conditions, and encourage their patients to follow similar paths to bring about change in their lives.