Songs from the Black Chair

Title essay "Songs from the Black Chair" won the 2005 Pushcart Prize. Read an excerpt Day after day, night after night, desperate men come to sit in the black chair next to Charles Barber's desk in a basement office at Bellevue and tell of their travails, of prison and disease, of violence and the voices that plague them. Between the stories, amid the peeling paint, musty odor, and flickering fluorescent light of his office, Barber observes that this isn't really where he is supposed to be and reveals his privileged youth in contrast to his own nightmare of mental illness. By relating these troubled lives to his own, Barber illuminates some of the most disturbing and enduring truths of human nature.

Charles Barber is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. Barber won the 2005 Pushcart Prize for the title essay, “Songs from the Black Chair.” Excerpts or pieces related to Songs from the Black Chair have appeared in the New York Times, UTNE Reader, Psychotherapy Networker, and on National Public Radio.