Connecting With A Treating Clinician After Recovery

"The wheel is come full circle." William Shakespeare from King Lear 1606

Connection. Caring. Belonging. Tenderness.  

These things make a full life. A life worth living. A life that a person will fight to experience, even through side-effects, global identity negation, and revolutionary personal changes.  

Paradoxically, these soul traits are almost universally missing in the common trajectories of recovery many march along after diagnosis with a serious mental illness.  

The hardest part of my initial journey back to the world was the loneliness. The isolation. The disconnection from the norms of my remembered life.  

I needed friends. Intimacy. The gentle ease of dealing with someone who cared about me.  

The need for connection, and for friendship, is ubiquitous. Best-selling business author, Tom Rath, wrote a book called Vital Friends about the need for friendships at work , and the suicidologist Thomas Joiner states that the hopelessness of a perceived static state of “thwarted belongingness” in one’s relational life is a robust predictor for serious suicidal actions.  

Years after my time in the VA hospital, I was working with a national advocacy group and had been asked to present back at the VA hospital in which I was once a patient.  

I was allowed access to a locked ward and escorted to the staff room, where ten people were sitting in chairs waiting for me to enter and tell my story. I liked returning to the VA to speak. I was excited to be interacting with the staff and hopeful my experience would be helpful in their duties.  

As I began my talk, I started to look each of the audience members in the eyes. Their stares were easy, and they seemed receptive as I continued to move the discussion more deeply into the suffering of my illness and the anguish of extreme delusion.  

In the back row was an MD who seemed to be on the brink of tears. I didn't understand why, as I was yet to reach the more devastating parts of my diatribe.  

She was absolutely riveted on me.  

The room seemed to fall away as her brown eyes became my entire consciousness. My body began to tense, and my abdomen constricted as I realized who was staring at me. 

It was my doctor on the VA unit. Dr. “S.”  

This was the doctor I thought was trying to kill me when I was a patient. The doctor I thought was torturing me and keeping me from claiming my manic millions. This doctor was the focus of my fear and contempt toward the hospital and treatment in general.  

But what I had found out in the years following my release was that she was taking fantastic care of my family. In discussions with my mother, she said that without Dr. S neither her nor I would have made it.  

Later, I worked with a psychiatrist who had worked for Dr. S and who said she was the best MD she trained under.  

I simply could not have been more wrong about her.  

When the presentation was complete, I made my way to Dr. S. She stood and we just looked at each other. I took her hand and said, “Thank you for saving my life and protecting my family.”  

She waited a moment and told me she had been reading about me in the papers. That she was so proud of me and my work.  

I felt the urge to connect even more deeply with her and asked if I could hug her.  

And there, on the locked unit of a VA psychiatric hospital, I embraced this woman, this caregiver, this angel for my family and myself.  

Years later, I would present Grand Rounds at the medical school where I am currently a volunteer faculty member. The school is physically attached to another psychiatric facility that treated me as a patient. In the history of the school, I was first person to host Grand Rounds two floors above where I was an involuntary inpatient.  

Dr. S could not make the event, but it was taped for the VA and she sent her daughter, a dentist, to see it. At the end of the Grand Rounds, I was able to tell the daughter what her mother did for me. How she stopped my family from imploding during my extended stay in the hospital.  

What I realized after the daughter walked away was that Dr. S not only treated me, but she also cared for me, and now I cared for her.  

My work is grounded in being the bridge between patient and doctor, the PhD, DNP, LCSW, RN, etc. I work to educate myself on trauma, mental illness, suicide, neuroanatomy, and other clinical concerns, and to be able to connect with those who devote their lives to saving people with my same behavioral health issues, and hopefully create more opportunities for the healing that comes from those divine hugs.  

Have you ever connected with a former patient years later? What did the experience mean to you?

Eric Arauz, MLER, is an international behavior health consumer advocate, trainer, and inspirational keynote speaker. He is a faculty member at the Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Department of Psychiatry, the Vice-Chairman of the current New Jersey Task Force on Opiate Addiction in citizens 18 to 25 years old, and a person with the lived experience of bipolar I disorder, PTSD, addiction, and suicidality. He is the SAMHSA 2012 "Voice Award" Fellow and the author of  An American's Resurrection: My Pilgrimage from Child Abuse and Mental Illness to Salvation. 

The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the blog post author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Psych Congress Network or other Psych Congress Network authors.