Step behind the doors of the enigmatic mental health clinic know as The Looney Bin where the healers struggle to heal themselves and where caregivers become the cared-for.
Meet psychiatrist Jack Rackham whose façade of self-control shatters after a haunting patient suicide wrenches him from his illusions of stability and thrusts him into a world of duplicity, disillusionment and alienation from the people and things he loves.
Other quirky members of the clinic's staff, each lugging their own baggage, daily navigate their own labyrinth of emotions and the blurred line between sanity and chaos as the characters of The Looney Bin either confront or bury their inner demons.
Enter the rigid religious zealot, Felicity Steele, hiding a deep secret behind her Bible, the rebel therapist Hester Snopes using Tarot cards and talking with the dead as therapy, the psychopathic sexual predator Maximo Hernandez, whom the DEA is watching. There's passive, timid Jim Bizby agonizing over erupting feelings for a seductive patient and doing the 'right' thing in his marriage to a shrewish wife. And last, there's the needy, self-absorbed Reginald Kingston-Smith, MD, clinic head, busy seeking reassurance from his massive office mirror and stroking his glistening handlebar mustache. Experts in the human mind, they're all on a precipice of a choice: to confront their hidden fears and self-doubt or perpetuate the lies they tell themselves each day.
In this character-driven, compelling psychological drama, The Looney Bin lays bare the fragile threads that bind human behaviors and relationships. Deeply buried, long-held secrets, tarot cards, exploitation of power and control and a clash between the perfect and the broken intertwine, demanding each member of The Looney Bin to change or to continue the illusory lives they've created.
Prepare for a mind-bending journey through tangled minds and unraveling truths in a story that exposes the raw, unfiltered intricacies of the human psyche.

From the author: As a psychiatrist, I've heard the many jokes about those of us in the mental health field being 'weird' and 'crazier than the people we treat'. Curiously, I've found that those making these taunts are the ones that most need someone who will listen to them and help them gain a better understanding of themselves. Over the years, I've found that human beings (doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs) are all pretty much the same, including psychiatrists. We want to be happy. We want to be loved and to love. We want to feel good about ourselves, have others like us and to feel that we have worth and a purpose in our lives. Yet sometimes events, other people and even ourselves get in the way of our quest for well-being.
In The Looney Bin, I have my characters working in a mental health clinic to bring out the point that even experts in the human mind can have emotional difficulties and need some help just like anyone else. And whether they decide to help themselves...or not. My novel is about people. It's goal is simple, to show that confronting our emotional fears rather than running from them will bring us the happiness we all seek and hope for.

About the author: Stan Kapuchinski, MD is a psychiatrist thriving in southwest Florida.