It's Only Kind of a Funny Story

First, I’d like to make a film recommendation: go rent It’s Kind of a Funny Story. It’s the story of a teenager who inadvertently ends up in the psych ward due to the trials and pressures of adolescence. It’s funny and it’s got heart. (It’s also got Zach Galifianakis, or Alan from The Hangover.)

But in reality, the psych ward isn’t all that funny. I spent four weeks there during my psychiatry rotation, and it saddened me far more than I had expected.

Yes, there are crazy people there, to put it crassly. But these are the sickest of the sick, people who are suicidal, homicidal, psychotic, or are so impaired that they are unable to care for themselves. So they don’t get better quickly, if at all. It is kind of exciting to see a textbook case of schizophrenia for the first time, complete with voices, paranoia, and bizarre behavior. But when the person is still hearing voices coming from the heating vents two weeks later and drinking mouthwash to make themselves throw up the medication because they believe the doctors are trying to poison them, it’s just heart-wrenching.

An episode of mania in a person with bipolar disorder can be amusing, too, for the first few minutes; my team treated several, and some believed that they were being stalked by millions of people, and that these people were also stealing all of their belongings. The patients jumped from idea to idea with no connection between them, leaving me with whiplash after each interview. Yes, they said some hilarious things, always with a completely straight face. But when I heard some version of the same stories day after day, despite increasing doses of medication, it became clear that these were people who likely would be unable to function on their own in society for long periods of time. They had their physical health, but their minds were seriously impaired.

Overall, I enjoyed the four weeks. I disliked not touching my patients and it was a little bit strange to need keys to let myself through the double doors onto the ward, but the hours (roughly 8AM-4PM) and autonomy (leading the team’s daily interview with my patients, taking full responsibility for calling patient’s families for further information and writing detailed daily chart notes) were great. I even had fun studying. But I quickly realized that, while I found it fascinating to read about the various diseases and symptoms that can affect one’s mind and personality, I could only feel frustrated and sad when I interacted with people actually dealing with them. It seems that pediatrics is still the field for me.