Elizabeth B. Ford, MD, is a psychiatrist who has worked with mentally ill inmates at New York’s Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward. In her memoir, Sometimes Amazing Things Happen, she shares her struggles to balance her life and her work, to care for her children and her patients, and to maintain the empathy that is essential to her practice—all in the face of a jaded institution, an exhausting workload, and the deeply emotionally taxing nature of her work.

In this 2017 interview, she talked with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross about the book and her experiences.