Throughout history, people with mental or emotional problems have been believed to be 'special', generally considered 'rare' or different from others. They are not usually seen as part of ordinary society, of "normal" society. Over time, they have even been isolated, rejected, and even, on some occasions, locked up so that they do not create problems in the community.
When one gets to know a little more about this, having contact with the patients, talking with them, knowing their true essence beyond the mental or emotional problem, one realizes that this is not the case. Throughout my career I have listened to the most expert psychiatrists that what differentiates a person who requires the assistance of a psychiatrist from a person who does not require it, is the quantity.
I spent a while trying to understand what they meant by this quantity. In other words, people with these mental and emotional problems are the same as everyone else, but they differ in quantity. I tried to see this, but in medical training we see that there are some genetic and developmental circumstances of the nervous system that predispose to the appearance of these pathologies. So it was hard for me to understand that the difference was only in quantity.
On one occasion, after a general meeting, a teacher did an exercise with everyone on the team. We had different psychiatrists in training, graduate psychiatrists, teachers, therapists, psychologists, nurses, and students of medicine and other health careers. All of us considered "normal"; none of us had ever attended a psychiatric consultation for any particular problem. And the teacher surveyed how many of us had obsessive ideas, which in medicine refer to intrusive, absurd, exaggerated thoughts that we try to get out of our heads, and that often require certain rituals to do so. And we all, without exception, had obsessive ideas of some kind.
This created an impact on me. Really what differentiated us members of that team with a person, a patient, who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), is the quantity. While we have some obsessive ideas, which do not affect our daily life very much, they consume very little time and we do not pay attention to them, a person with OCD experiences these obsessions in high quantity almost all day, every day. For this reason, these ideas affect his quality of life and generate suffering, and that is why he takes medication, not because he is different from us, because he is a "madman" or because he is a strange, different being. It also occurs with depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, sleep disorders, among others.
Patients who attend the psychiatric consultation think, feel and live symptoms that all of us also experience at some point, but they experience them in an intensity, frequency and duration that exceed their adaptive strategies and suffer a lot. We all feel sadness, anguish, anger, joys, we grieve, we have our obsessions, we have been perplexed, we have had sleepless nights, we cling to ideas that no one believes, we do our crazy things, we behave strangely, and sometimes we think outside of reality. But when these experiences exceed a limit, affecting functionality, well-being and quality of life, it is when people require our help, so that we can help them reduce symptoms and learn strategies to overcome these experiences.
If you want to work on you in a more personalized way through face-to-face psychotherapeutic consultations or by Skype, click here.
Guillermo Mendoza Velez
Medical Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist
www.SaludMentalyEmocional.com
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