Mental Health

I had an interesting but tough day…not a physical tough, but an existential sort of tough. One of those days when you see and hear things that are so infuriating that you feel like there is too much wrong with the world and our problems are so complicated that nothing I do will make an impact? Are my contributions worth anything when the problems are so great? What is this stupid research actually doing and will it help anyone?

Today I accompanied two health professionals to do site visits of potential patients that were being evaluated for mental illnesses. It’s hard to explain the feelings you have when you’re talking to these people—you have to see the way they live and the expressions on their faces when you ask them if they’ve ever thought about taking their own lives and they say yes. One of the doctors asked a patient why he had been feeling so sad lately and he just started to cry…he told us that he had bought rat poison with the intention to commit suicide, but never did it. The woman had been abandoned when she was young, but remembers her father murdering her mother—although it’s hard to tell whether this in fact did happen, if that’s what she remembers, that in and of itself is traumatic. Both the patients we saw today also had other mental disabilities that had either never been diagnosed or never been treated when they were younger; the man admitted that he never learned to read and had to repeat the 1^st grade 5 times, while the woman had attended a special school but never finished high school. Now they’re adults and their issues are worse and they’re not necessarily being well taken care of…but if they were poor when they were younger, it’s no surprise that they were never diagnosed and that they’re poor now…raising offspring that continue the cycle of poverty and perhaps mental illness down the road without the resources to care for themselves or prevent harm.

It’s hard to imagine how people can become desensitized to these stories and these images, I felt emotionally drained after two visits and I’m sure those are not even the worst stories.