My mental health: whose task is it?

 

I had my first appointment with my mental health nurse today (this post was written in early February).

 

It’s been about one and a half years! She went on maternity leave, and then I went on gap year, so we haven’t seen each other for longer than I was away for.

It was soooo good being back with her. Today’s session was spent catching up with each other, especially about how I spent my year abroad, in a mental health aspect.

I explained how my year was below average, because I felt that a lot of aspects of my life weren’t getting satisfied (my blog post “My 2019 Gap Year“)

 

I had around four depressive slumps throughout last year.

 

One even lasted for a whole month.

 

One of the reasons why I had these slumps was because of the stress I was receiving from external factors; parents or students of whom I was teaching. My mental health nurse amusingly asked if the education pressure over there was significantly higher than here, hence the additional pressure from the parents onto the students and the private education teachers, aka me.

I don’t know, I just felt very displeased with how I was receiving unnecessary stress through my job. I can handle my own levels of stress, but when someone else dumps stress onto me; there’s not much I can do about it initially. And the Asians out there could especially understand how much pressure and stress the parents and students would be dumping onto me.

 

I also talked about the progression of my health from the past year, which was the main topic of our conversations on this day.

One of the reasons I went to Korea was to receive treatment regarding my Fibromyalgia.

 

And you may ask here; what is Fibromyalgia?

 

Fibromyalgia is a chronic nerve condition where intense pain and stiffness is felt throughout the muscles and joints in the body. Symptoms include widespread pain, fatigue and sleep disturbances. Diagnosis is difficult and can be unknown for even years, where it is finally diagnosed by ruling out other conditions such as arthritis.

 

Fibromyalgia actually doesn’t have a cure, but apparently there was a psychiatrist at Korea’s most prestigious hospital who specialised in both Fibromyalgia and depression, and so I was referred to him through another doctor at this hospital.

 

Sounds pretty good, right?

 

So this psychiatrist was to work alongside me to manage my life and control my level of fibromyalgia and depression medication, to decrease them eventually to a low level.

And so I started going to him for treatment.

 

But MAN it was expensive. And also INTERESTING, because whenever I went to the psych ward, there were SO many people in the waiting area. Which is ironic, because Korea is DEFINITELY not a country known for acknowledging mental health. But hey, it was interesting in a positive way, seeing all these people willingly sitting there to receive treatment. A step towards the right direction, yes??

But because of the endless number of patients, these doctors were literally seeing a patient every 5-10 minutes. Which meant MY consulting time was only 5 minutes at most times. It was really only enough for him to ask “how are you doing?”,  hear a rapid response to the question, then conclude what he would next do with my dosage of medications. And then I’m out of the room, just like that.

And because I didn’t have medical insurance (unlike how most other Koreans do), this 5-10 minute session would be $100 nzd.

And then the prescriptions for my meds would be like, another $200 for 6 weeks worth.

And on TOP of that, I saw another psychiatrist weekly. This one managed my emotional state and touched base on how I was doing, just like a psychology session. This was for 45 minutes, and $100 per session.

So you can imagine how the medical bills easily piled up.

 

But I appreciated my sessions with my two psychiatrists. I think I was very grateful that I had the privilege of seeing TWO psychiatrist at one time- a huge thing to be grateful about, indeed. It really helped having the emotional support and just having someone who intellectually understands me to listen to my inner thoughts and my mental state. Someone to let out onto my weekly happenings, my ups and downs, my emotional condition, what was on my mind, and anything that triggered my stress, depression or anxiety.

She just patiently listened, didn’t judge, and asked the right questions to guide me down the pathway to relieve my emotions. She did not interfere with my stream of consciousness, and did not tell me what to do.

Which may be questionable, right? A psychiatrist that didn’t tell someone what to do, or how to get better? Nope, she wasn’t like those psychologists. At first, I couldn’t understand why she didn’t guide me in ways to get better. But after reading a book called “The Courage to be Disliked”, I can understand her philosophy in not interfering with me. The book explains how, the famous psychologist Adler divides up ‘tasks’ by the specific person who needs to do them. For example, for a child who needs to study, it isn’t the parents’ task to get the child to study; it is the child’s own task to do so. We need to think with the perspective of “Whose task is this?” and continually separate one’s own tasks from other people’s tasks. One does not intrude on other people’s tasks.

And so when it comes to me with my mental health; whose task is it to make myself improve my health?

 

It is no other than myself.

 

So it kiiiind of made sense for my psychiatrist to not interfere hugely with telling me what to do with my mental health.

 

What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree that the separation of tasks is applicable to a relationship between a psychiatrist/psychologist and patient? Or do you think that it is the psychiatrist/psychologist’s active role to make someone get mentally better?

 

Anyway. That was roughly my medical journey for the year while I was in Korea.

I didn’t talk about the specifics of my medications that I was on throughout the year, but that may be explained in another post.

 

I think it is nice to summarise my psychology/mental health sessions with my nurse! It is a good way to reflect on the session, to open up to the world about what I’m going through, and to hopefully knock even lightly on the tall wall towards opening up about mental health.

So that probably means I will be back soon with another update on a mental health clinic session.

 

UNTIL THEN, lemme know your thoughts on this, thank you for reading this far down, and bye for now!