Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Only in Berkeley event of the day

I participated in a 12-minute die-in for health care reform today on Sproul Plaza. We had to move a little down the path because of a huge display of bloody fetuses by an anti-abortion group, and the counter-protest by a pro-choice group. As I left, a student was stepping up to a microphone and welcoming everyone to a celebration of Filipino Awareness Month.

Just another Tuesday in Berkeley.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Narratives

I heard a talk from Rachel Remen last week, whom I found extremely charming and inspiring, even though the talk was projected from a DVD. Apparently some people's charisma comes through even in virutal presence. Anyway, she offered the following anecdote:

Three stonecutters are sitting at their work stations cutting stone. The first is asked, "what are you doing here?" He answers, "I just sit and do the same thing every day, putting the stone through the cutter. It's terribly boring and mindless and I can hardly stay awake."

The second stonecutter is asked the same question and answers, "I am making money to support my family. Because of me my children are growing up healthy and learning about the world, and my whole family is happy."

The third stonecutter is asked, and responds like this: "I am helping to build a cathedral -- the most beautiful, most monumental building and a wonderful accomplishment of human cooperation and ingenuity."

The story tells us about the importance of the narrative. Each stonecutter is doing the exact same thing, but each bestows his own meaning to it. This is, of course, a lesson we can personally all take home as we try to bestow meaning to our own lives.

It's also relevant to my learning as a physician. A patient has his or her own narrative that will always affect the clinical encounter and the outcome of the case. In psychiatry, which I am just beginning to learn about and which for some reason makes me often think of the Jennifer Lopez movie The Cell, how the patient constructs his narrative is everything.

I asked my teacher, "But the idea of 'early life stresses'... doesn't it get blown out of proportion, and lead to blaming everything on the parents?"

But, and as her answer hinted, I don't think this is the right way to think of things. A medical model would tell you, well, stress here (and maybe a genetic predisposition) leads somewhere along the line to illness. But in psychiatry, we're not diagnosing that way. We're listening to what's going on in the patient's inner world, trying to understand how she conceives of her health, thoughts, and relationships to other people and things. It's not so much about what "really happened" but about how the patient has experienced those things.

The approach becomes not, "what is the stonecutter actually doing?" but rather, "How does the stonecutter construct his narrative about what he's doing?"