Wander & Wonder

Before my psychiatry rotation, I carried some unconscious biases about people with mental illness. I expected psychiatric patients to be somehow different from me, but after spending five weeks in a psychiatric hospital, my perspective has really changed.

One patient in particular left an impact on me. While working in the short-stay unit, I met a 25-year-old man diagnosed with schizophrenia whose story really touched me. He was diagnosed at age 17, and he spoke openly and insightfully about his experiences, referring to it as his “journey.” It struck me that we were the same age and that he had once been a law student, with ambitions not so different from my own. Hearing him talk about how his life now revolves around managing his condition was eye-opening. He described the shift from being, in his words, “just like any other teenager” to a “mentally unstable guy” from one moment to the next. He shared the challenges of medication compliance, explaining that every medication comes with different side effects, sometimes intolerable or even scary, complicated further by the voices he hears, urging him not to take his medications.

Of course, I will never be able to fully understand what his experience is truly like. Yet, I realized how much we had in common, which really comes down to one simple fact: we are both human. I never want to lose sight of the humanity I share with patients. I never want to see myself as fundamentally different, or even worse, as being “above” them. Unfortunately, that mindset happens often with the hierarchies that exist in medicine. So here’s to never forgetting that we are all more similar to one another than we think, even if it does not seem so at first glance.