April Narrative Medicine Rounds with Donald Antrim

For April Narrative Medicine Rounds, we are honored to welcome Donald Antrim, critically acclaimed author of ONE FRIDAY IN APRIL: A Story of Suicide and Survival(link is external and opens in a new window), a searing and brave memoir that offers a new understanding of suicide as a distinct mental illness.

Through a clear and haunting reckoning with the author’s own story, One Friday in April confronts the limits of our understanding of suicide. Donald Antrim’s personal insights reframe suicide—whether in thought or in action—as an illness in its own right, a unique consequence of trauma and personal isolation, rather than the choice of a depressed person.

Donald Antrim is the critically acclaimed author of the novels Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist, as well as The Afterlife, a memoir about his mother. A regular contributor to The New Yorker, he has also been the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Public Library. 

Antrim will be in conversation with Dr. Michael Devlin, academic psychiatrist and Professor of Psychiatry at Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. In addition to teaching and supervising psychiatry residents in cognitive behavioral therapy, Michael Devlin, MD is active in medical student education, including interprofessional education, and he has conducted clinical research in eating disorders, obesity, and bariatric surgery. He is also medical director for psychiatry in the Columbia Human Rights Initiative Asylum Clinic, and he co-supervises the Columbia Student Health Medical Outreach (CoSMO) Behavioral Health Clinic. His clinical work is in adult general psychiatry with an eating disorders focus. He has had the good fortune to collaborate closely with the narrative medicine program over the years, and, as a seminar leader and coach for medical students throughout their four years of medical school, narrative medicine has been at the core of his teaching and mentoring of our future healthcare professionals.

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. A recording of our Virtual Narrative Medicine rounds will be made available following the live session on the Narrative Medicine YouTube channel, and you can watch other recent Rounds events there. You can also listen to a podcast of past Rounds on iTunes.