He had tried to hang himself, and had managed to break some veins, maybe fracture a little cartilage, by the time his wife discovered him. It had been touch and go, I suppose, and a long time in the intensive care unit, but he had truly cheated death.
This 55-year old highly-credentialed university professor didn’t look the part of a depraved rapist — little or no hair, red-faced, bashful, perhaps — but that very accusation caused him such despair that he tried to take his own life.
A student had accused him of this horrible “impropriety.“
Obviously, these charges of sexual misconduct shamed him severely. He maintained that the charge had been trumped up. The woman who had accused him had indeed some kind of a psychiatric history.
It is not uncommon for women to make this sort of accusation.
He told me he did not want to hate women. He also told me that he had a female judge.
I cannot help but think of the E.M. Forster novel “A Passage to India” which draws as accurate a psychological picture as anyone could of the sort of young woman who could make such an accusation.
Strangely enough, I could find essentially nothing about this as part of the psychological literature. I did find a lawyer who had started a blog online, and said that this was a very large and essentially ignored problem. Read more on False Rape Accusations — Who’s The Victim?…
Filed under Uncategorized by on Jan 25th, 2011. Comment.
She was a young female staffer in her first professional position. What she may have lacked in experience, she made up for with a lot of heart and she extended her maximum effort for every single patient.
I had been like that in the beginning, too. At first, you have no body of knowledge to draw upon, but you quickly learn every time a new patient comes in. With experience, you see it becomes clear patients are more alike than different, and the work is at least a little less onerous.
But our newbie had a very few months experience with this intense clinical situation. So every single patient was new and scary, and she gave her all. One week before she had dealt with one of the most difficult situations.
Read more on The Operation Was A Success, But The Patient Died…
Filed under End Of Life by on Jan 18th, 2011. Comment.
He was 19. I saw that on his papers before I let him into the office. I knew it meant trouble.
Someone who was only 19 and was in the county mental health system had to be either big trouble or a big manipulator. Working with adolescents is tough for me because I have to “set limits;” often yell and scream. That is absolutely not my favorite way to be a psychiatrist, to read people the riot act. But 19 year olds often need that.
I sometimes have to be more of a surrogate mother than a psychiatrist.
He had been recently hospitalized for a “psychotic break.” That is when someone who is alleged to be normal suddenly starts hearing voices and seeing things. It’s not always mental illness — maybe some drugs on board, maybe some kind of stress. At least I had the records from the hospitalization.
Yeah, drugs on board. Some speed, some pot. The “baby-momma” of his first child (God, was he proud) was no “fun” anymore. She wanted things like child support — clearly not a “fun” request.
Now I have read some recent studies from other countries — this is not the kind of thing they do here — that when there is the risk of hereditary pathology you can feed a kid Omega-3 fish oil and maybe prevent this “psychotic break” — or at least delay it. And yes — to me someone 18 or 19 years old is still a kid. Read more on You Can’t Help Me Unless You Are Like Me…
Filed under Prejudice by on Sep 15th, 2010. Comment.
He was 23 years old with a rich ethnic heritage and identity that he said gave him strength. He looked like any one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of “youths” you could find on the streets. A couple of tattoos. The kind I would see when I was driving with my husband and think sometimes “wow, it was so much easier in the days of Marlon Brando movies.” I would have preferred a handsome renegade in a leather jacket to this obese, angry, unkempt person who clearly did not want to talk to anybody, including me. He was not my patient. A frustrated therapist asked me to see him because no medications had worked on him. She had expected me to come up with a miracle drug we could get samples.
He told me the same thing, over and over again, that he was doomed, that nobody could help him, that I was a nice lady, nicer than most, but I was wasting my time just like the rest of them.
He heard voices, always angry and deprecating voices, telling him he was going to die, that he was no good and deserved to be killed. Many times, in his life, he had attempted to prove the voices correct. Read more on The Devil’s Role In Mental Illness…
Filed under depression by on Jun 25th, 2010. Comment.