Wednesday, July 18, 2012

What if symptoms make sense?

Some depression patients I have met in the IPD are depressed with no reason. They feel sad, low, don't feel like doing anything or like crying all the time without any cause or reason. They don't know why they feel that way. But other patients such as  I have talked about before at Don Bosco have gone through a lot of trauma and abuse, which in my understanding can be the cause for how they feel. As I said before, if there is a particular and obvious cause of their symptoms then it often would make sense to take that cause into closer consideration if we want to help the patient get better. A lot of times, for those patients medication is not working anyway. Today, I have met this patient who is a borderline and depression patient. She is a teenager who was going through rebellion in the US. All of a sudden, her parents took her from the US where she grew up in to a totally foreign country for her which is India. Because she has great difficulty adjusting to the new environment in India she started hurting herself out of despair. How otherwise is she able to express her anger, frustration and complete helplessness to what has been done to her? I know there is much more to the case than what I have said but for me the response to what has happened makes sense.    

No comments:

Post a Comment