Silently mad
One of my co-workers on psychiatry and I had a nice talk today. Even more hilarious was my joke about my possibly having ADHD. My co-worker responded with 'I had you pegged in the first five minutes. Even when you couldn't talk, you were still interrupting.'It was said because I had laryngitis for the first week of my psych rotation and had to 'write' to talk. Do you have any idea how rough it is to not speak for a week, especially when your main job is talking to your patients? While I am now a killer charades player, there isn't an easy why to pantomime 'are you having auditory hallucinations?'
Kudos to my partner Brandon for patiently trying to translate my impatient scribblings on my trusty silence notepad. Who knew doctors and doctors-to-be had terrible handwriting?
Psych is one of those things that is both exciting and disappointing at the same time. It's cool in some ways because your job is to communicate with your patients and try to understand how and what they are thinking. However, during inpatient psych, you also don't feel like you are being a doctor - I'm not even carrying my stethoscope. Physical exam equipment in nonexistent. Heck, I even snuck down to the ER to get a measuring tape. (It's not stealing; it's a redistribution of the hospital resources)
That doesn't even start on the patients. In theory, about 1 in 3 patients have a mental illness, which means that psychiatric disorders are massively under diagnosed. By the time you end up on the psych floor of the hospital, you have be be practically uncontrollably mentally ill. We're talking psychotic, my TV is monitoring my movements, psychotic. There isn't alot counseling and therapy can do for people who are sure the government is putting thoughts in their heads. Your best bet is to medicate them out of their psychotic break and hope that the types of therapy you teach them prevents them from doing this again.
However, the social problems of this all still prevails. For example, what can you expect from a schizophrenic that has never held down a job because the illness disrupts basic functioning? Or that poor manic patient who spent her lifesavings and then some during her last manic episode where she also got fired from her job? A lucky few of the seriously mentally ill will get rehabilitated and rejoin society. The rest of them will be back here on my floor again in a week, a month, a year.
posted by Allie @ 7:49 AM
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