I noticed something recently.
A while ago, I found myself stuck in the company of a “friend” who particularly aggravates me. I find her behaviour controlling and contradictory, while her endless negative rhetorical remarks seem to demand constant agreement.
Family loyalty and civility demand that I entertain her.
“She’s driving me nuts,” I found myself saying out loud to another long-suffering friend.
Then the thought occurred to me. What if she succeeded and really did manage to drive me nuts?
What if I lived with her and was unable to escape, or if she were my mother, or was my boss, my manager, or my daughter?
What if the unvented emotional reactions to this woman wore me down, finally got to me, and in desperation, I visited my doctor and reported my anger, insomnia, mood swings, frustration, and despair?
I might enter the GP surgery with just a problem “friend,” manager, or neighbour, but I might leave with a clinical disorder and a prescription for some chemical mind salve. I am sure such a situation has arisen more than once in the history of mental health care and treatment where a person is medicated to better cope with an impossible relative.
What then of the clinician or ancillary worker working in the psychiatric field? The world of work can be a challenging one at the best of times, and the world of work in psychiatry certainly comes complete with plenty of frustrations, big and small, that can accumulate over time. Is it possible that such situations can actually drive people mad?
Several years ago, while working in a particular clinical department that was renowned for its stress-inducing qualities, I did a quick straw poll to see how many of the staff on my shift were taking anti-depressant drugs. I was astonished to learn that I was the only one who wasn’t medicated, and believe me, I had often contemplated it.
Various staff jokingly suggested that you don’t have to be mad to work here, but medication certainly helps!
I asked everyone on the following shift, and the pattern was the same. Everyone was medicated.
I began asking more questions, and a familiar pattern emerged: without the medication, people felt they were prone to depression or serious stress, and so on.
In short, the majority actually thought that they had a condition.
Maybe some did, but somehow I doubt that only depressives would be employed by one department.
Staying sane in insane environments certainly isn’t easy, and by definition, a psychiatric ward must be considered an insane environment.
In an age of political correctness, I have heard too many psychiatric professionals ask me cynically, ‘Well, what is normal anyway?’ with the suggestion that all madness is relative and no one should put themselves in a position to judge another.
While this may seem like a noble idea, in practice, it often fails. I find that by the time a person is expressing this ideal, generally their own personal boundaries and standards of what is normal have seriously started to falter.
“Judge not others that thou shalt not be judged” are wise words I once read, but it does help one’s own sanity if one has a way of measuring any deviance from what one considers normal.
While it can be difficult at times to determine where the problem actually lies – whether it is me or this place – Possessing a strong sense of self and the ability to measure what is normal for me can help keep things in perspective enormously.