Even Psychiatrists And Psychologists Need Support

Psychiatrists and psychologists suffer a lot due to their long-term dealing with psychiatric patients, listening to their problems and exposure to the negative energies from depressed and suffering patients.
Some studies mentioned that about 70 % of psychiatrists are suffering from mental illness and have the symptoms of depression, sleeping disorders and even suicidal ideas.

When psychiatrist is aware of that, he can help himself to avoid mental or psychological suffering, and provide better medical service for his patients.

There are many stories of psychiatrists and psychologists showing that mental and psychological illness is not an obstacle for practising their work.

One of them is the story of Rufus May, a British clinical psychologist who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1986 at age of 18, Nowadays, he is known to use his illness experience in treating psychiatric patients with different approaches other than medications.

When he completed his clinical psychology training, he mentioned some of his experience in suffering from psychiatric illness, he spent many times in psychiatric hospitals, he suffered from day dreaming during his teenage years, sleeping disorders, crazy ideas and thoughts of receiving T.Vs and radio messages.
After spending a year of taking psychiatric medications, he finally decided to stop all those drugs, and take another way of treatment, he started to do exercises and social activities, he now works in consumer recovery groups.

The second story to tell is Dr. Aashish Tagore story, He is a British psychiatrist, who was stigmatised between his colleagues because of being a psychiatrist with mental illness.
His bad experience made him feel the stress, conflicts that his patients live in, and their desire for isolation from society to avoid people’s looks and whispers.

Regarding his psychotic symptoms, he stated that after the acute phase, his treating psychiatrist was supporting him to take enough rest before coming back to work stress.
He experienced the fear of being stressed by his illness or being relapsed.
He was eager to get back to work but simultaneously he had a lot of worries about his illness and controlling symptoms, but his greatest fear was from relapse.

There were many questions in his head, can I detect the early signs of being relapsed?, can I differentiate between usual anxieties and symptoms of my illness, and alarming paranoid ideations and delusions?
He was always asking himself? If I relapsed again, would I have the ability and courage to tell my supervisor and colleagues about that?, it was so hard to imagine this possibility.

In addition to all of the above fears, there was another big issue concerning taking the medications, other worrying questions came up, take them and stand all the undesirable side effects?, or stop them and take the risk of possible relapse?, ... and finally, he decided to take them.

After all of these conflicts and fears, he was the winner of this hard challenge,
Every day passed without abnormal thoughts, his self confidence was gradually increasing.
and, Step by step, despite his slight fears concerning relapse, he became able to regain his life and enjoy his beloved work again.

At the end, we have to admit that, doctors are also humans, they get diseased, have their own fears, and need other's support.