Psychiatrists suffer too | Psychology today

Source: Cottonbro Studio/Pexels

Psychological pain

Psychiatrists are people. They are just as likely to develop psychological pain as the rest of us. Furthermore, psychiatrists must spend much of their professional lives listening to the suffering of others, without any respite to look forward to, apart from the periods spent on demanding administrative tasks, which can be just as onerous.

In addition, psychiatrists can feel traumatized when a patient acts out suicide or take someone else’s life. Sometimes they can be held responsible for a patient’s actions, a concern that can cause many sleepless nights. They not only have to deal with work pressure, but also with sadness, risks, fearand violence every day of their working lives.

No wonder they suffer. Tragically, some of them even take their own lives. The suicide rate This is thought to be significantly higher among mental health professionals than among the general population.

I have been a psychiatrist for many years. I still look away, or even leave the room, when someone is about to commit suicide in a movie or TV drama. And I still wonder how I dealt with all that pressure and all that sadness.

Sympathy

A psychiatrist is not immune to the suffering of his patient. If they are compassionate, and in my experience the vast majority of them are, they will feel their patient’s pain, which is not pleasant. There were mornings when I woke up and wished I had a happier job, like selling flowers or planning weddings.

But compassion is a necessary quality for a psychiatrist. When we are sick, we want to be treated by a competent and compassionate person caregivernot only because this will make the healing process more humane, but also because a doctor who has the ability to empathize will also be better able to understand what is happening to us, which will in turn help him find the best cure .

But there’s a problem. Compassion is very human emotion which is influenced by the patient’s personal and social characteristics. It is believed that compassion developed as a result of a specific fact evolutionary demand to protect our own tribal relatives, a very different task from deciding who should undergo expensive examinations or be admitted to an acute bed.

Research has shown that the qualities that arouse compassion are membership in a tribe or group, affective warmth, and perceived helplessness. The problem is that some are chronic psychiatric patients may be perceived as distant or even threatening and therefore lack the characteristics that would naturally generate compassion. These patients may therefore miss out on the benefits associated with compassionate treatment.

Even if we accept that a lack of compassion in such a situation would hinder honesty, it will still be undesirable and probably impossible to exclude this emotion from a psychiatrist’s interactions with his patients. Psychiatrists might try to transcend their feelings of compassion by acknowledging them with intellectual skepticism while incorporating more logical and objective considerations into their views. decision-makingbut it is far better to actively cultivate compassion in their minds for those who are unable to produce this feeling in others, which in itself is a handicap worthy of sympathy.

Dishonest social image

Psychiatrists are often portrayed in the media as authoritarian agents of the state who cannot wait to lock patients against their will and damage their brains with aggressive interventions. In reality, they are desperate to improve their patients’ health and normalize their lives as much as possible, and they often suffer significantly in the process.

Think about it for your psychiatrist, if you have one.