Whom the gods would destroy , they must first make mad
I am finishing up my second week of psychiatry rotations, and I really love it. I get to sit everyday and talk to people, understanding their stories, trying to unravel their minds. The people I talk to range in severity, but considering I am working inpatient in the psych ward at the hospital right now, most of them are hindered enough by their mental psychoses not to function well in the outside world. Take for instance, the homeless man with chronic paranoid schizophrenia who believes there is a chip implanted in his brain and that everyone is in a plot against him and injuring him with electromagnetic waves they radiate. Or, a bipolar gentleman who without reason becomes irritated and tries to first attack the nursing staff then slit his wrists. I really feel like Dr. Jekyll sometimes, wanting so badly to find away to uncloud their minds. It is nothing they did to themselves, it just...happened.
Perhaps the most difficult part of this work are talking with the families of patients who come in on their first psychotic break. They can't understand it, how their perfectly normal, intelligent, wonderful son or daughter all of a sudden has changed. It frightens them, more I think, than a medical ailment would. What happens when they get worse? They will never be doctors or lawyers, their lives may never ever be the same. Yesterday I held a mother as she broke down and started sobbing because she was so frightened because her son was speaking in delusions; she scrambled desperately for any reason that could be causing this other than a mental deterioration. Who wants to be faced with the fact that their child may be going mad, that there may be a point when this reality becomes completely foreign to him.
It is not only the patient the gods destroy, it is their families, their friends. The fascination and frustration of this field...sometimes, we have to accept that for the moment, we cannot cure, simply ameliorate and provide as much support as we can. I wish I could see, for a moment, what the patients see. Is there somewhere in the recesses of their minds where they remember how they once were? Or are they, as Jekyll would sing, "lost in the darkness."
Perhaps the most difficult part of this work are talking with the families of patients who come in on their first psychotic break. They can't understand it, how their perfectly normal, intelligent, wonderful son or daughter all of a sudden has changed. It frightens them, more I think, than a medical ailment would. What happens when they get worse? They will never be doctors or lawyers, their lives may never ever be the same. Yesterday I held a mother as she broke down and started sobbing because she was so frightened because her son was speaking in delusions; she scrambled desperately for any reason that could be causing this other than a mental deterioration. Who wants to be faced with the fact that their child may be going mad, that there may be a point when this reality becomes completely foreign to him.
It is not only the patient the gods destroy, it is their families, their friends. The fascination and frustration of this field...sometimes, we have to accept that for the moment, we cannot cure, simply ameliorate and provide as much support as we can. I wish I could see, for a moment, what the patients see. Is there somewhere in the recesses of their minds where they remember how they once were? Or are they, as Jekyll would sing, "lost in the darkness."