Getting Away With Murder: Exploring Clinical and Forensic Medicine through Fiction and Personal Narrative

I'm a great lover of crime fiction; it's what I read for enjoyment, and it's what I like to write.  But there's nothing more frustrating than settling down with a thriller or piece of true crime and having the villain come off as a cliché, not fully fleshed out, or not believable.  In these presentations I take my experiences as both a psychiatrist and novelist to go inside the human psyche and explore why people do the nasty things they do.  

At present I offer two presentations on this subject: 

A Road Well Traveled: The Physician-Author and the Continuum of Story:

In this presentation--suitable for Grand Rounds and professional conferences--I explore the path by which physicians, and other health-care providers, easily and logically cross the divide from clinical writing to mainstream fiction.  It's a road well-traveled from classic greats like Arthur Conan Doyle, and Somerset Maugham to contemporary best sellers like Michael Crighton, Robin Cook Tess Gerritson, F. Paul Wilson and many others. 

This is a subject, near and dear, on which I've published in the past and am currently developing some new feature articles.  

The Novel Side of Psychiatry, published in Psychiatric News (December 2004) click here

The Killer Psychiatrist of Litchfield County Tells All:

This a free-flowing romp through abnormal psychology that will leave you wondering about important people in your life.  It's well suited for libraries and organizations that want a presentation that contains equal parts of information and entertainment:  

• Is your boss a murderous sociopath?  

• What would it take to make your wife snap and pick up an axe?  

• What is your neighbor doing in his garage late at night?  

• Are you capable of murder?

These fun questions, and many more, get answered as we look at murderers both real and literary.  What you'll discover might surprise you, give you some food for thought, and maybe a sleepless night.  

Check out my latest on this topic in Writer's Digest Magazine August 2006 .

Click here to view a partial list of organizations to whom I've presented

To schedule a talk or signing contact me at Atkins Unlimited, LLC

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