Looking Beyond the Illness and Into the Heart of the Patient

By: Peggy Cunningham, NCC, LPC

“Real success is finding your lifework in the work you love.” - David McCullough

I often marvel at how lucky I am to be able to come to work every day, being in the place I want to be, and doing the thing that I love to do.  I feel passionate about working in the behavioral health field and providing the best care we can to those who seek our assistance.  I also am glad to see the progress we have made in destigmatizing mental illness.  There was a recent commercial on TV where several celebrities are seen with family members or friends with an identifiable mental illness.  The message “These are real people with real feelings with real lives’ and people who love them.”

My hope for everyone is that when you come to work, that you want to be here and you are doing what you want to do.  I also hope that as we interact with our patients, we look beyond the illness to the face and heart of the person who has the illness.

 When I was a senior in high school, I had a classmate commit suicide.  This was many years ago when those kind of things “never” happened particularly in rural Nebraska with a senior class of 45 students.  This young man was just an average student, he played football, had a girlfriend, and seemed like everyone else, yet he was profoundly depressed and lived in a black hole he could not get out of. What did I learn from this experience?  “Look beyond the appearance, never fail to take a moment to acknowledge someone, and life is precious.”  In one of my first jobs in the behavioral health field, there was an adolescent girl who left the hospital, overdosed on medication and laid down on her mother’s bed where she died.  She had worked on multiple family issues and yet felt so alienated and tormented she took her own life.  From this experience the lessons I learned were, “Listen to the person, look at the system, and when one family member is mentally ill the entire family suffers from mental illness.”  There are many more stories I could tell that exemplify the seriousness of mental illnesses.

There are also many success stories we have.  I think about one client I worked with who had been sexually abused by a neighbor when she was young.  She used drugs, alcohol and many other things to try to silence the demons that stemmed from this abuse.  After getting clean and sober, getting on the appropriate medication and some intense therapy, she was able to function at a level she never dreamed possible.  Another time I was in a grocery when a teenager ran across the store to say hi to me.  She had been someone I had worked with in a hospital.  Her mother told me how well she was doing and thanked me for helping her teenager and her family. I like knowing what we do makes a difference.

As I write this I am reminded that mental illness is a treatable illness.  I am also reminded that what we do is difficult and also has its rewards.  I remain committed to what to our mission of providing excellence in psychiatric care.