Lauren Slater

“There is no way, I believe, to do the work of therapy, which is, when all is said and done, the work of relationship, without finding your self in the patient and the patient’s self in you.” (xii) Dr. Slater believes the basis of therapy is connection between the therapist and the patient. Dr. Lauren Slater is a psychologist who works in a clinic for schizophrenic men, and over the course of her book, Welcome to my Country, we hear about a few of her patients as well as herself. Slater’s empathy allows her to connect with her patients and helps her find ways to help them handle their pain. Her trials of connection reveals her belief that disconnection is the root of mental illness.
A loss of language and a barrier to divide the essential

Slater is very fond of Marie to the point where she will call Marie “my Marie”. Since depression is very common and 90% of people recover, Slater was very optimistic about Marie’s case. However as time passes, Slater becomes less optimistic. No antidepressant medicine has worked, and neither did recalling her past. Slater was sure bring up her past and any past traumas would work because it allowed trauma to be recall and reshaped. Marie lived in a household where there was little comfort; her father’s “comfort was vodka, his release a rage that could send Marie or one of her sisters slamming against a wall. Her mother’s comfort was food and fatness.” (118) During Marie’s treatment, she has a three week long remission where she got a job. When the remission ends, she accidently overdoes on heroin to feel relief. While Marie is at the hospital, she refuses to attend group with other people, and Slater joyfully looks at this as anger. After Marie gets discharged, she gets lost and has to spend the night at a homeless shelter. When Marie makes it to her appointment the next day, “her face and hair were damp with oil and her lips were chapped, the fissures bleeding lightly.” (132) When Slater sees Marie, she panics and she “wanted lotions and soaps, cups of steeped tea I could feed her. I wanted—an urge so strong it surprised me—to make her a meal, that wish for eggs I could crack against a steaming skillet, the gentleness of yolks.” (132) Slater and Marie try other methods of dealing with depression and all fail. In the end, Slater tells Marie “Perhaps … You won’t overcome your depression. Perhaps you’ll have to … have to learn to live with it.”