fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Susan Cunningham

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Midnight on the Psych Ward

In June 2013, my life was upended by a psychotic break after several months of chaotic and progressively disabling thoughts and behaviors. Then, on Father’s Day in the early morning, I became acutely manic, convinced I was going to solve the problem of the exorbitant cost of undergraduate education. Instead of sleeping, I wrote frantically in a notebook, filling the pages with my thoughts and plans for saving humanity. Meanwhile, I also became convinced that my upcoming presentation for my Master’s in Health Professions Education should be the first and in fact only presentation at that day’s Convocation Seminar. At 3 a.m., I called my eighty-year-old parents and insisted that they come right away–a one-hour-plus drive–to watch my extraordinary presentation.

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Vilomah

The three years from 2013 to 2016 were the worst of my life. I am still recovering.

In June of 2013, I had a mental health crisis, diagnosed as an acute psychotic event and eventually bipolar 1 disorder. The loss of my mental health was crushing. I was fifty-two years old and married with two amazing young adult children. I had a great career as a physical therapist and was seemingly thriving in a master’s program. After a manic weekend with little sleep, racing thoughts, compressed speech, grandiose plans and euphoria, I was hospitalized in the psych unit. After a week of acute care, I transitioned to a two-week partial hospital program. Unfortunately, two months later, I sank into the other “pole” and struggled with a clinical depression. With a lot of support, love and compassionate psychiatric care, I gradually resumed working and carried on.

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Pain

I am a PT with 38 years of clinical experience. Though I have many interests, the human experience of pain, especially where physical pain intersects with emotional pain, has been a patient-care focus of mine for some time now. I am also a mom of  two, one of whom I lost to the disease of addiction six years ago. And recently, I have been an orthopedic patient, having had a partial knee replacement two months ago.

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