From a book I'm reading...
"I am interviewing my new outpatient, Lisa, a fidgety young woman with darting eyes that avoid contact with my own. She perches on the edge of her seat, seemingly ready to bolt, her left leg jiggling fervently as she describes to me the circumstances leading up to her most recent psychiatric hospitalization.
'I sat on my bed in the dark with a loaded gun to my head, completely numb, just getting the courage to pull the trigger. And then, out of nowhere, my cat jumped in my lap! I dropped the gun and just started crying. And then I called my boyfriend. I couldn't even talk, but he just knew it was me. He came right over and drove me to the hospital.'
When I suggest that her cat could have just as easily startled her into pulling the trigger, Lisa's leg motions cease and, for the first time, she meets my gaze head-on.
'That would have been OK, too.'
My adrenalin gives a mild surge, but my eyes meet hers unflinchingly. We have our work cut out for us, I think. 'So what do you imagine would have to change in your life for you to feel differently about that?' I say out loud, alert to every nuance, verbal and nonverbal. She meets this question with a long, thoughtful pause.
As Lisa ponders her response, I marvel at the social and historical forces that have propelled the two of us together: she the help-seeker, semiattached to her life as if it were a half-severed limb, and I, the salaried healer, paid to be committed to her life, at least within the allotted time, until the next patient takes her place and I focus on that person's anguish. A clock silently logs the minutes on my desk, its glowing red numbers managing the procession of patients in and out of my office in this busy HMO health center, where a multitude of lives in turmoil intersect with my own. My time is a semiprecious commodity to the insurance company that pays for it. My patient's time? She clearly puts no value to it at all."
-G. Garfunkel, 1995
'I sat on my bed in the dark with a loaded gun to my head, completely numb, just getting the courage to pull the trigger. And then, out of nowhere, my cat jumped in my lap! I dropped the gun and just started crying. And then I called my boyfriend. I couldn't even talk, but he just knew it was me. He came right over and drove me to the hospital.'
When I suggest that her cat could have just as easily startled her into pulling the trigger, Lisa's leg motions cease and, for the first time, she meets my gaze head-on.
'That would have been OK, too.'
My adrenalin gives a mild surge, but my eyes meet hers unflinchingly. We have our work cut out for us, I think. 'So what do you imagine would have to change in your life for you to feel differently about that?' I say out loud, alert to every nuance, verbal and nonverbal. She meets this question with a long, thoughtful pause.
As Lisa ponders her response, I marvel at the social and historical forces that have propelled the two of us together: she the help-seeker, semiattached to her life as if it were a half-severed limb, and I, the salaried healer, paid to be committed to her life, at least within the allotted time, until the next patient takes her place and I focus on that person's anguish. A clock silently logs the minutes on my desk, its glowing red numbers managing the procession of patients in and out of my office in this busy HMO health center, where a multitude of lives in turmoil intersect with my own. My time is a semiprecious commodity to the insurance company that pays for it. My patient's time? She clearly puts no value to it at all."
-G. Garfunkel, 1995