What's it like to practice psychiatry when you yourself have bipolar disorder, PTSD, or addiction?

Clinicians who've walked that line share how it impaired and strengthened their work.

Welcome to the Carlet Psychiatry Podcast, keeping psychiatry honest since 2003.

I'm Chris Aiken, the editor-in-chief of the Carlat Psychiatry Report.

And I'm Kelly Newsom, a psychiatric MP and a dedicated reader of every issue.

In 1913, at the age of 38, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung began to hear voices.

They were paired with hallucinogenic-like visions, and they worried the young psychiatrist who wrote

that he was menaced by a psychosis or doing a schizophrenia, a diagnosis that Young would

have been familiar with, having worked as an assistant

to the physician who coined the term schizophrenia, Eugene Bloiler. About one in 50 people have

normal hallucinations that aren't connected to any psychiatric disorder. It's a controversial fact,

and if you want to delve more into the evidence,

it's in our July 2019 article on Normal Hallucinations by Joseph Pierre.

Suffice it to say that, unlike psychiatric patients, these healthy voice hearers have no major

functional impairments and tend to have hallucinations that are helpful, like a guiding angel.

Some have other clairvoyant powers and function in society as ministers, soothsayers, or psychics.

Several of Carl Jung's relatives, including his own mother, had such clairvoyant powers.

Young's experience was frightening at first, but it came to see it as a valuable encounter with

his own subconscious mind.

He leaned actively into it, actively inducing more visions in private by exercising his imagination.

Carl Jung recorded these visions in a red leather book that his family kept hidden after his death.

It was finally published in 2009 as the Red Book, complete with an imitation leather cover, it reads like one of the prophetic

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