Šedesát let v psychiatrii jako majitel klíčů – Honzák Radkin (2024)

The Owners of Keys was a play by Milan Kundera that premiered in 1962 in Prague, and its plot unfolded over the course of an hour and a half on a Sunday morning. In contrast, the narrative of the memoir by psychiatrist, psychotherapist, publicist, and educator Radkin Honzák (born 1939), Sixty Years in Psychiatry as the Owner of Keys, completed in 2024, spans a lengthy sixty years within the context of the everyday routine of Czech and Czechoslovak medicine, pharmacology, and especially psychiatry. The precise and expert, diverse, thrilling, and sometimes unbelievable memories share one common thread: Radkin Honzák, as the owner of the keys to rooms, buildings, facilities, and fences, always sought to open those metaphorical closed doors for his patients, as well as for his collaborators and colleagues, or at least to crack them open as much as possible. He did so successfully. The journey through the modern history of Czech psychiatry from the perspective of its direct participant and mover, summarized in fourteen chapters of personal professional memories, should be required reading not only for those who remember.