In this time when once again COVID-19 deaths are rising, the toll from yet another hurricane and wildfires are just being tallied, and the bodies of 13 American servicemen and women were just returned from Afghanistan, I would like to offer these words about grief: grief lies to you.
Words matter. The language that we use to describe people and event color and shape our perceptions of them. With the role of words in shaping perceptions in mind, I propose that there are at least 4 common phrases that deserve to be retired.
In the Marine Corp, David learned an important lesson about being a man that he had not learned from his father. He learned that bottling up his feeling and refusing to express emotions such as frustration, fear, or sadness, did not make a man strong. Carrying extra emotional baggage actually made a person weaker and less able to step up and do what needed to be done in difficult situations.
Just breathe. Most of you have heard this advice when you were out of breath with excitement or anxiety and trying unsuccessfully to tell someone what was happening. There is actually some very sound science behind this advice. When you experience strong feelings of fear, anger, or excitement, you do not just experience it in your head. You feel it in your body.
I recently wrote a piece about why I believed that police officers should receive ongoing mental health counselling to help them manage the stress they unavoidably experience on the job. I argued that poor stress management can lead to too many mistakes in the field, but I would like to give one example to illustrate this point.
The greatest threat to a police officer’s life and safety is not the armed and violent offender which he/she might encounter in the course of their duties. It is the person who looks back at them from the mirror when they brush their teeth.
Medical professionals respect their patients’ values, but they do not always respect medical decisions which they have strong reason to believe are based on being misinformed. This standard of care is not perfect, but it saves many lives, and there is no logical reason why the same treatment standards applied to other patients could not also be applied to psychiatric patients.
If we value the lives of our fellow citizens who are suffering from debilitating brain illnesses, we will spend what we need to spend in order to protect them and help them get well.
My (now retired) boat captain brother in law earned the name Hurricane Harry after his charter cruise was rescued by a Russian freighter off the coast of Florida during one of the season’s unpredictable storms. When he had left the port at Miami, a hurricane had been detected by radar, but it was far offshore and was predicted to make landfall north of the state […]
There is a long overdue debate currently going on in the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) over whether the separation of Neurology and Psychiatry into two separate disciplines still makes any sense.
