I remember a recently admitted patient, nose-to-nose with his psychiatrist, screaming at her “you don’t know what I’m going through – how the fuck do you know what it’s like little missy?”.
The psychiatrist finished the discussion, saying she’d come back to him later, and after a brief pause to collect herself, moved on to the next patient in the ward round.
It is still an incredibly vivid memory for me, partly because everyone else in the room knew that the psychiatrist had been a patient herself, as she had a lifetime’s worth of experience dealing with her own mental health issues.
Study after study has shown that psychiatrists have higher rates of mental illness than the general population.
Research published in 2001 revealed that 56% of female psychiatrists have a family history of mental illness, and just over 40% have experienced one themselves – almost twice the rate of other doctors. Undoubtedly as a consequence, psychiatrists have double the rate of suicide of the general population.
Psychiatry is certainly a stressful job, but research has also found that there are higher rates of mental disorder in future psychiatrists, suggesting many go into the profession precisely because of their experiences.
Other mental health professionals are much less studied, but from my own experience, I suspect the histories and motivations of mental health nurses, psychologists and social workers and so on are are likely to be similar.
The reason I mention this is because Phil Dawdy has just written a powerful article on responses to a recent murder of a psychologist in New York.
Several people wrote comments to his original notice saying that the murderer was likely on a whole bunch of meds that were making him crazy; and, mental health workers hurt patients all the time, so they get what they deserve.
It is quite apparent that unlike in other areas of medicine, the mental health system has a ‘them and us’ attitude.
Ironically, it is the single area of medicine where ‘them’ are most like to be ‘us’, regardless of whether you’re a patient or a professional.
Link to Phil Dawdy on murder of a New York psychologist and reaction.
Mind Hacks 
My mother, who has a master’s in social work, always says, “People go into social work to fix themselves or their families.”
In Plato´s book Republic, the greek philosopher says that only a physician that suffered himself the disease is enable to cure it.
I grew up in a very dysfunctional household. As an adolescent, my parents insisted a see a shrink, not because I needed one, but to validate their misguided opinion that I suffered “emotional disturbance”. When I entered college, I majored in psychology because I wanted to try to find out if my parents’ feelings about me had any basis in fact, or if it was the other way around, and they were the ones with “issues”.
I am engaged in psychoanalytic treatment at present. I am dealing with issues dealing with incestuous relations with a parent. My relation with my analyst sometimes feels like a dizzying swirling romance with all its encumbent heights and disappointments. I often sense my analyst unconsciously or otherwise is an active participant in a double fantasy within the structure of therapy.
To continue the above the sexual contact was with my mother some years ago. My analyst is a very attractive young woman. I often feel I have fallen in love with her as a surrogate mother or sister or daughter. Antigone leading the blind Oedipus.
My brother, a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, has completely cut himself off from his family a son. He has apparently realigned with a second family and has no communication with his son or sister. He specialized in family therapy and his second wife is a psychologist, ???