Ron Ruskin is a Toronto writer and psychiatrist-analyst.

Ron Ruskin is the author of The Last Panic, a medical thriller, and the tragic-comic novel The Analyst Who Laughed to Death. His novel, Confessions of a Medical Student, was released in September 2018 by Sphinx Books. His most recent novel, The Walls of Jericho, a conspiracy thriller released in July 2026, diagnoses the digital age as a contagious terminal illness. Ron is a founding editor of Ars Medica, a medical-humanities journal, and has published over forty-five stories in literary and medical journals. He has co-edited texts on psychotherapy supervision, as well as on humanities and medicine, such as his 2011 book Body and Soul.

Ron Ruskin is a staff psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital and associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He directs a hospital day-treatment program where he works with a mental health team treating psychiatric patients. Ron has written and presented papers on the impact of suicide on residents and psychiatrists, boundary violations in psychotherapy, the psychoanalysis of violent sports, such as hockey, and the importance of arts and humanities to heighten sensitivity to the pain and suffering of others. (Read more of the author’s story.)

 

New Release July 2026:

“A hard-to-shake techno-paranoid fever dream about the collapse of truth, trust, and sanity in the digital age.”

—Kirkus Reviews

The Walls of Jericho

Dr. Leila Elfassi is the new director of the emergency psychiatry ward at Manhattan Central Hospital. But just as she takes the position, a strangely contagious mental disorder starts to shake the world. Violent rage, extreme paranoia, and sudden group-think are spreading as fast as viral internet memes, and researchers studying the cause of disorder find their work sabotaged — or even end up dead.

And then, Leila learns a terrifying truth about the plague from an anomalous archeological find in the ruins of Jericho that the scientific community refused to hear: this has happened before.

Buy this book

“The novel opens precisely at 10 AM on February 3, 1991, and the narrator punctuates his patient’s post-traumatic state of mind in abrupt, simple sentences that convey the confusion of Leila Elfassi, a six-year-old who has been injured in a car accident that kills her mother.”

– A Michael Greenstein Review

 

The Walls of Jericho

Excerpt from Chapter 1

Pine Ridge. February 3, 1991. 10:00 AM

Leila awakens in a white room, her eyes and body leaden. Her head throbs. Her mouth is parched. Everything is strange. The bed is not her bed. The room is not her room. Beside her, a window exposes a white expanse. Rolling hills of snow. The window thermometer reads -18 Celsius. She cannot move or talk or think. Her left leg is stiff. She is six years old. She has no sense of where she is or what has happened. Her small hands travel over her shoulders and neck; they discover the bandage above her eyes, the grey splint on her left leg. She gazes through the room. A silver bracelet is on a table beside her bed. An intravenous line is in her right arm. Her mind is bruised by a dark unknowing. She is without memory. Terrified, she screams.

An older, heavy-set woman in white appears.

“Leila. You are in the hospital.” The nurse reaches out to touch Leila’s arm. “Do you know what happened?”

Continue Reading

 

Upcoming Events:

Summary Block
This block has no content yet. Items you add to the page connected to this block will display here.
Featured

More Books by Ron Ruskin