Home
/
mental health
/
Page 2

Tag: mental health

You Have a Split Personality

Raymond Abbott November 13, 2015 6 Comments

Raymond Abbott

I am a social worker working with severely mentally ill adults. One of my clients is Lawrence Walters, a small, thin man in his late fifties, very schizophrenic even while on medication. He talks about spirits holding him down, making him do things he doesn’t wish to do. He is impossible when off meds, tolerable when on, and difficult just about all the time. But at last I’ve got an edge on Lawrence–and it’s not because of any particular social-work skill.

Lawrence often asks me to take him places–usually shopping, but sometimes to medical appointments, such as an eye exam. (Lawrence is missing one eye, which some say he himself poked out when especially ill. I can’t confirm this story, however,

He Ain’t Heavy

Edward Beal May 22, 2015 9 Comments

Edward Beal

In my decades as a psychiatrist, I’ve seen many different kinds of patients; only in the past five years, though, have I worked with soldiers.

I see them through TeleHealth, an organization that offers patients long-distance care via a sophisticated form of Skyping.

I originally took this job for financial reasons (during the economic downturn of 2008), but I quickly discovered its unique rewards.

Early on, for instance, as I stood waiting for an elevator, a quadriplegic soldier maneuvered his electric wheelchair alongside me.

When the doors opened, he looked up and said, “After you, sir.” That’s not a memory that fades.

Finding a Bed in Bedlam

Jo Marie Reilly May 8, 2015 4 Comments

Jo Marie Reilly

There’s a full moon tonight.

“That’s when crazy things happen,” my superstitious mom always says.

I’m a family physician doing weekend call at my urban community hospital. My pager rings incessantly. As I answer yet another call from the emergency room downstairs, I think, Maybe Mom has a point.

“Got a suicidal patient with nowhere to go,” the ER physician yells into the phone, against the background commotion. “This guy John has been here for three days. He’s casted on both feet and can’t walk. The insurance company’s authorization nurse says she can’t admit him because it’s not medically indicated–but if a doctor gives her an indication, she’ll authorize it. Can you do it?”

Chocolate Cake

Sanyu Janardan March 6, 2015 20 Comments

Sanyu Janardan

I was a first-year medical student, starting my first afternoon at an outpatient clinic as part of an introductory course in clinical medicine. My white coat was freshly washed; I had a rainbow of pens in one coat pocket, and my shiny name tag dangled from the other. I only hoped that I was as prepared as I looked.

I entered Mrs. Carr’s room. A fifty-five-year-old woman, she sat gingerly at the edge of her chair, looking ready to get up at any moment, as if the appointment were already over. She gave me a cursory glance, then went back to folding and refolding the bus-ticket stub in her hands.

I asked a well-rehearsed question: “What brings you to our

Bless Our Children

Deborah Kasman August 8, 2014 No Comments

Deborah Kasman

About the artist:

Deborah Kasman is a family physician and mother of two teens. A practicing clinician and academic bioethicist, she works as a bioethics director for Kaiser Permanente in southern California. “Two-and-a-half years ago, I started painting to reconnect to my own soul, having gone through my own experience of trauma while raising a child with undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome, who had uncontrollable rages. I paint by a method called Intuitive Painting, whose mantra is ‘the canvas can hold all of your feelings.’ “

About the artwork:

“I was in a painting

Q & A

Kyle Bernard June 20, 2014 12 Comments

Kyle Bernard

The interview had lasted fifteen minutes so far, and we’d made minimal progress. I was a medical student doing a rotation at a physical medicine and rehabilitation clinic back in my home state, Wisconsin. It was the end of the day; to save time, the senior resident, Paul, had joined me in the exam room so that we could hear Leora’s medical history together.

A year earlier, Leora, in her mid-fifties, had suffered a stroke. After a few weeks in the acute-rehabilitation hospital, she’d been discharged, and she and her husband, Ellis, had been lost to follow-up. Now they were back, hoping to resume Leora’s care.

Saving My Appendix

Andrew Gray September 6, 2013 No Comments

Andrew T. Gray

The doctor was adamant. “This is America, not Sweden,” he told me. “We operate.”

How did this happen to me? I wondered, looking at him across the ER exam room. How could I, a healthcare provider, not have insurance?

I had woken up that morning with a mildly upset stomach. Nonetheless, I’d gone to my job (begun only six weeks earlier) as a physician assistant at a Beverly Hills HIV clinic. I’d seen patients until lunchtime, then attended a research meeting. The subject was a study of irritable bowel syndrome.

“I need to be in this study,” I joked to a coworker. “My IBS is acting up.”

I don’t have IBS, but I was indeed having crampy stomach pain. I continued to see patients

Recovery Room

Warren Holleman April 1, 2011 No Comments

Warren Holleman

We’re sitting in a circle: seven women and me. Most are in their thirties and forties, and in their second, third or fourth month of sobriety. They look professional in the suits they’ve assembled from the donations closet of our inner-city recovery center.

I start things off by reminding everyone that this is the last day of the group. The last hour, in fact.

All eyes turn to Dorothy.

Dorothy is a proud woman, tall and tough and strong. And a former track and field star, although now she’s wheelchair-bound.

She speaks in a deep, husky, monotone punctuated occasionally by dramatic earthquakes–otherwise known as spastic tremors. But in all this time, she’s avoided talking about herself, fueling the suspicion that she’s hiding something

Angels and Phantoms

Joanna Dognin August 13, 2010 No Comments

Joanna Dognin

“Mama,” a little voice pipes from the back seat. “Why is that boy in a chair?”

The sun is beaming into the car as we sit at a stoplight, waiting to exit a store parking lot. My two-year-old daughter has spotted a young man, barely twenty, who smiles weakly as he rolls by in an electric wheelchair, collecting money for muscular dystrophy.

“He’s in a chair because he needs help moving around,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because his legs need help.”

“Why? Because they don’t work?”

“Well…”

“Why are they broken?” she asks. “Is he broken? Why is he here? Where is his mama? Mama, where is the boy’s mama?”

* * * * *

“Dr. Lobozzo, you got any

Help Me

Jennifer Reckrey November 13, 2009 No Comments

Jennifer Reckrey

Editor’s Note: Jennifer Reckrey kept a weekly journal of her experiences during her intern year.

Week 13

I had a few free minutes at the end of my clinic session this past Thursday morning, so I took over a walk-in patient from an overbooked colleague.

The patient was a large, muscular Salvadoran man in his early forties who had long-standing hypertension. He said that for the past three months, he’d been feeling tired and didn’t have the energy to take his daily medications. Just a few months back, he’d finished a five-year prison sentence for armed robbery. Now he was living temporarily with his twenty-year-old daughter and her boyfriend, but he told me that he couldn’t

Tug-of-War

Jo Marie Reilly August 7, 2009 53 Comments

Jo Marie Reilly

As I teach first- and second-year medical students to take patient histories and to perform physical examinations, I always feel humbled and privileged–energized by their compassion, enthusiasm and facile, curious minds.

Occasionally, I feel particularly challenged–especially when I’m teaching a student who, though bright, is struggling to acquire some of medicine’s basic skills. As we journey up the learning curve together, my responsibilities can conflict: as a teacher, I want to nurture an aspiring student physician, yet as a physician, I must ensure that patients receive appropriate care.

Now, sitting quietly in the corner of the room and watching a young medical student interview a county hospital psychiatric patient, I begin to feel this tension.

“What brought you into

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

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

Tag: mental health

You Have a Split Personality

He Ain’t Heavy

Finding a Bed in Bedlam

Chocolate Cake

Bless Our Children

Q & A

Saving My Appendix

Recovery Room

Tug-of-War

Subscribe to Pulse.

It's free.

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

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

Tag: mental health

Start typing and press enter to search

Subscribe to Pulse.

It's free.