Projections launch

Greetings! and welcome to Projections. 

This blog will have information and updates from the literary side– including publishing, commentary, and reviews.

I'll also repost here relevant social media that initially appeared elsewhere. 

I am delighted to announce that Projections can be preordered now. The initial book announcement (below) is from February 24, 2021 on Twitter: 

This book has been incubating in many ways for 20 years– I wrote the first chapter during my psychiatry residency, before I started my lab at Stanford. 

Projections is unusual– not easily captured in a few characters­– except I could begin by saying that universal inner experiences of humanity may sometimes be revealed, in the chaos and tumult of emergency psychiatry. 

Caring for those with severe mental illness has been a constant thread in my work, starting with 8 years of dedicated medical training & psychiatry residency, followed by inpatient & outpatient care for the past 17 years @stanfordmed. I don’t usually speak or write about it. 

Still, scientists and artists alike know that the broken might describe the unbroken–whether in geology or genetics or poetry. And part of Projections is the telling of human stories through the throes of personal– or geopolitical– upheaval. Sometimes both at once. 

There is a personal side for me as well, in Projections… moments of terror and grief, which helped set me onto the path leading to where we are now; but some of these experiences are tempered now, with later joys that could not have otherwise come to be. 

In each story, threads from literature and imagination, from human history and prehistory, and from modern neuroscience, can all be found interwoven with the connections from psychiatry (which alone, I think, would not be enough to show the full picture). 

Projections is written for all– but especially for those who have always wondered about mysteries of the mind (whether working smoothly or somewhat less so), and who think about the hope (and the challenges) that may come with understanding. 

Projections is for anyone (non-scientist or scientist, art-lover or artist) pondering those feelings that make us human, broken and unbroken as we all are­– as individuals and as humanity– by joy and defeat, peacemaking and violence, parenting and loss. And mental illness.

And so Projections belongs also to all who have suffered from (or borne witness to) major illnesses and disorders of the brain: stroke and dementia, brain tumors, bulimia and anorexia, borderline and antisocial personality, depression and bipolar, schizophrenia and autism. 

As a physician treating, and seeking to understand, these conditions, I’m profoundly grateful to my patients for their courage– and to my wonderful family who supported me throughout, to the exceptionally brilliant members of my lab, and to my visionary agent and editor. 

Take a look if you like, and share if you wish!

-Karl