Excerpt a personal story from keynote, "Living Stories of Hope and change: The Challenge to Change" Cheryl L. McLean, Alberta Psychiatric Association 2014 Scientific Conference
Many psychiatrists (the healers of the soul) enter psychiatry as a profession because they are interested in helping those
who suffer and are in need of healing, opening the door to human understanding. You want to know why people behave the way
they do, you want to use your considerable education and skills to help people
be well, you want to restore balance and quality of life to those you care
for. Among you today will be those
who commonly deal with issues around
depression, anxiety, paranoia, and /sex abuse...
Many psychiatrists have themselves seen what it is to live on
the other side of the door, they may know, through lived experience, through
their fathers, their mothers, their aunts and uncles what abuse and alcoholism
is, some have suffered devastating personal losses of those closest to them,
many have grown up
with family members who have lived with depression and other mental
illnesses.
Research
shows that doctors, in general, are at greater risk for depression, mood
disorders and suicide and psychiatrists, according to The American Psychiatric
Association, commit suicide at rates at about twice that of other
physicians. Dr. Michael Myers, Professor
of Clinical Psychiatry and a leader in physician health and wellbeing also stresses deeply depressed physicians
still feel the effects of the stigma of mental illness.
I have some
personal experience with this through my mother now 87, who had been the head nurse at a geriatric ward at our city
psychiatric hospital (previous know as an asylum for the insane) in Southwestern Ontario for over thirty
years. She started her career in
geriatric care as a nurse in 1952 and worked her way through the 50's, the 60's and 70's, through the days of electroconvulsive therapies , lobotomy surgeries, insulin
shock therapy, strait jackets,
restraints. One of my mother's many
assignments was to dispense
medications like tranquilizers and phenobarbital to 450 older patients twice
daily on five wards. Many of her
geriatric patients lived out their later lives and died in hospital. My mother was proud of her nursing job. When I was a girl of fourteen and thinking about nursing as a
career myself she drove me to her hospital, turned off the main street, past
the grassy fields and up the long, shaded
tree lined road and down the curved driveway leading to that big old building. I met her patients. They told me their stories. Some were very interesting. One nice lady said she was friends with a
"gangster" named "Duninger"
who, she said, went everywhere
with her.
Mom made sure she
kept the staff and the ward together.
But there were serious troubles at home.
Mom worked late most nights and always took her work home with her,
sitting at the kitchen table, draining the coffee pot, coughing and chain
smoking Export A's while trying to get her time slips done, couldn't sleep at
night, was worried about how to cover
for staff when attendants said they were
sick or took time off. Then one day she
just stopped talking, wouldn't eat, went to her bedroom, turned off the
lights and shut the door. But somehow even
through these darkest of times she
managed to get up in the morning at 5:00 a.m., get the car started in the dead
of winter and made it in ,on time, to work. My mother, an attractive woman, always concerned about her appearance, her
hair, her makeup, was meticulously, even
obsessively neat. We knew there was
something terribly wrong when she started falling asleep at night in her
uniform... One sleepless night while
fighting yet another migraine headache she cried out, "What's the
use?" Yes, she had her nursing
friends, but most of the time she tried
to make it through these dark times alone.
Mom would never have admitted she had a mental health issue nor that was
depressed. You just didn't talk about
those things. She was a psychiatric
nurse, and proud of it., she cared
for patients with mental illness, consoled
the families when their loved ones
passed away, her staff came to her when they were depressed, to
solve their problems. She was praised by the psychiatrists for her meticulous attention to detail
and tireless dedication to her job and her patients. My mother wasn't just a nurse. Nursing was my mother. As I reflect now years later I see that
my mother suffered with depression, the
classic DSM indicators of major depressive disorder but she wasn't sick...she was fine.
It was her job to keep everything under
control.
