Someone Else’s Problem: When Medicine Passes the Burden to Patients and Clinicians

In medicine, a referral can be placed, a consent form signed, a training completed, and a discharge summary sent—while the person who needed help is still left to make the system work. Someone Else's Problem examines what happens when health care passes its unfinished work to patients and clinicians. Through cases involving emergency dispatchers, military sexual trauma, suicide crises, physician shortages, research ethics, disagreements between doctors, and artificial intelligence, psychiatrist Timothy Lesaca asks a direct question: Who is responsible when a process is complete but care has not arrived? The book argues that empathy, trust, and choice cannot be secured by policy language alone. They depend on observable conditions: time to listen, services people can reach, explanations that make limits clear, and someone prepared to respond when a plan fails. It also rejects easy answers. Clinicians cannot be asked to absorb unlimited demands, and institutions cannot provide every service. But decisions about limits should be honest, explainable, and accountable to the people who live with their consequences. Someone Else's Problem is a clear-eyed examination of what medicine owes patients, workers, and the public when responsibility is most likely to disappear.