Mental Health awareness and professional compassion
What does it mean to be aware of your mental health?
There are so many aspects of the mental health of people. Just to list a few: sleep, physical activity, physical health, sun light, medication. Most people don’t realize that your physical health is directly tied to your mental health. Here is a story of a friend of mine that I met in IOP. I’m not giving names, to protect the identity of that individual.
G was a high profile sales person, and he was used to living on the road. Always on the go, with a large family at home. When he started having sleeping problems, he wasn’t aware of what was happening. Turns out, G was in pain from a back injury. When I met him, he was just coming out of Copestone mental ward, and he was in agony with pain. His back was in bad shape, and the amount of pain he was in, was visible. Little did he know, he had been going downhill for sometime, and with the amount of pain he was in, his sleep was being disturbed. Eventually it got to a breaking point, and he wasn’t able to control himself anymore. That’s when he was escorted to Copestone, and that’s when he was forcefully shown the error of his thinking. Once it was clear as to what was needed, he got the help that was vital to his mental health getting better. There is another aspect that he didn’t know about. He was misdiagnosed by several doctors prior, which put him on medications that made his bi-polar disorder worse, instead of helping it. Now, he’s happy and fairly healthy, but he had to go through that whole process to get the help he needed.
What’s the meaning of the story?
Well, it highlights how important two things are, physical health and proper diagnosis. If a bipolar disorder goes untreated, it can cause a multitude of problems. I don’t know the statistics, but there are some people that are bipolar which end up dead due to suicide. This fact is just sad in my book. We have all of this medical knowledge, but we are still losing people due to malpractice and/or lack of compassion.
Improper Diagnosis/Improper medication
With all of the professionals and all of the advancements of the mental health area. It’s still surprising to me how many still get a improper diagnosis. This can be tricky in some cases, but there are a lot of cut and dry cases which should be fairly easy to pin point. As far as medications, there are DNA tests which show what medications work with your body. If you are having problems with medications, you can easily find a clinic that offers that. Just keep searching for a clinic that offers DNA testing for mental medications. There are places that offer this, and most insurances cover this.
Lack of compassion
Me next point, compassion. This should be common sense that in the medical field you need to have some high level of compassion, but much to my dismay, it’s not that common. A lot of medical professionals are just there for the money, they stopped caring about patients somewhere along the professional path. I don’t know if it’s because there are so many people that need help OR the institution of making money on people’s ill fortune. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of professionals out there that truly want to help people, and to those people, my hat goes off to you. So far in my journey, I have met a few doctors that have a lot of compassion, and more nurses and PAs that have that level of compassion.
Reach out - be a friend
If you see someone in need, don’t be afraid to reach out and help. Even if it’s a phone call saying “Hey I’m thinking about you, and how are you doing?” That simple phone call could save someone’s life.
