The Fight Of Their Lives

Content Warning: Suicide, Mental Health and Illness

This personal essay was submitted as part of Catalyst’s 2020 Writing Contest and was selected as one of the winning submissions. To view more submissions from the Writing Contest, please visit utcatalyst.org/writing-contest.

Photo Credit: Derek Story

Courtesy of Unsplash

As a junior volunteer in the ER, I was as starry-eyed and invested as they come, ready to make a difference. Unprepared for the monotonous realities of hospital volunteerism, I spent the first several weeks searching high and low for opportunities to get more involved and be a part of the clinical team. It was not, however, until I had become fully resigned to the idea of my semester being a blur of changing dirty sheets, sorting syringes and gauze, “If you’ll follow me this way to your room, sir…” and any number of seemingly menial — though, I knew, important — tasks, that I got my first taste of what it meant to be in healthcare.

The man ambled up to the admission counter, no clear signs of distress save for the lilting, uneven pattern of his footfalls on the linoleum and the thin layer of dirt on his face. He was homeless and perhaps had made his way from a local shelter or from one of the tent cities that have become staples of overpasses in the area.

“We’ll put him in 13,” the nurse told me, having taken his vitals and chief complaint— a string of garbled and incoherent grunts. I wheeled him through the double doors, which swung open automatically with a swipe of my badge. I reviewed his triage notes: largely empty, except for the word “limp” scrawled on the line for symptoms, and beneath that, “possible Yellow pod.”

Yellow pod: a collection of dim rooms in a section of dim hallway bounded by locked doors, reserved for suspected psych patients prior to evaluation.

“Here you go, right in here,” I swung the wheelchair into Room 13 and pushed it up next to the bed, and lowered the retractable arm. The man took my outstretched hand, and I could feel the weeks’ worth of grit at the interface of our palms. He shuffled slowly toward the bed.

“Your nurse will be right in,” I told him as I turned to leave, with an amiable, practiced grin—a non-verbal tool I had come to rely on, a smile that cried “Listen, I’m just a volunteer.” Before I could take two steps toward the door, I felt the warm, calloused fingertips on my arm, and I turned, not knowing what to expect but feeling quite certain that I could be of little assistance.

“I-I need help,” the man stammered. He spoke with a much more clear and forthright tone than I expected.

“The nurse will be right in, sir. They’ll get you situated and then the doctor will come to see you.” I wanted to add, “I promise,” but I had come to understand how dangerous that word could be in a place like this.

“No, you don’t understand,” he continued, apparently seeing right through the self-assured façade I was desperately trying to maintain. “I need help. I need to see someone right now. I can’t –” he began tearing up, tiny pearlescent beads pooling in the corners of his eyes. “I can’t wait much longer. If I don’t see someone, I’m going to walk right out those doors and in front of a train, and you won’t see me again. I’ll be gone by tonight.”

His words hit me like the train he sought. It took me a moment to process what he was saying. Empty threats were something I had become accustomed to in the ER, especially working the Yellow pod. But there was something in the way he spoke, some indescribable quality of his voice, and the way he effortlessly and unabashedly found my gaze, I could tell that he meant it. Needless to say, I was thoroughly shaken by the interaction. Never had I felt so utterly inept — I tried to reassure him that help was on the way, that the nurses and doctor would arrive any moment, but beyond that what was I, a simple volunteer, to do?

And in truth, what are any of us to do? This is to say, what obligation do each of us have — if any — to those afflicted by psychological ailments, or despair, or just plain bad luck? The prevailing social stigma against mental health diseases says we have no responsibility for them and casts those individuals to the margins of healthcare. Through this experience and others like it, I have come to understand not only the legitimacy of claims of mental illness but also the tenderness and delicacy with which they must be treated.

My upbringing largely shielded me from the realities of psychological afflictions and, to some degree I am sure, instilled in me some implicit bias against these types of illness. But college has played no small role in my awakening, and I have since added my name to the long list of those pushing for mental health advocacy, a list that increasingly stretches through generations and across regions.

More than anything, I think that our acceptance of the legitimacy of mental illness has to do with the idea of mercy. How do we decide who is deserving of mercy, and to what degree? And who, for that matter, shall decide? If we believe that the function of healthcare is to treat those in need — to treat those whose bodily function deviates in some way from the norm — then it is clear that mental health falls squarely within those bounds. And if we believe that this system and the resources therein should not be a privilege reserved for those with unlimited financial security, then again, we see that mental health falls within the domain of this institution. The purview of mercy for the ill, therefore, quite clearly includes deviations of mental health from the norm. Though perhaps not having thought much about one’s merciful tendencies, I believe that most people would, when surveyed, consider themselves quite merciful. So, it seems that, in theory, willingness to extend some baseline level of mercy to those with mental illness should not be an issue. 

As for who should be the arbiter of such mercy, a concept of mercy-for-all that pervades social and cultural ideology is the ultimate goal. Until then, I believe it is incumbent upon the healthcare team to set aside any personal aversion to the idea of mental illness, in the name of fulfilling their oath-bound duties to both do good and, perhaps more significantly, do no harm. For if the refusal to treat psychiatric disease is born not out of concern for the individual’s well-being, but instead out of some ideological conflict that a healthcare worker possesses, then this refusal is akin to negligence, and ought to bear all the consequence of such inaction.

Of course, I realize that working with psychiatric patients presents a unique set of challenges that we may not be well-equipped enough to overcome as it stands. But why should we not address these obstacles with the same fervor for scientific and intellectual advancement with which we have faced down any other obstacle, be it medical in nature or not? If we are caring, considerate, and empathetic — and I believe that we are — then de-stigmatization of mental health does not seem like such a tall order. For the good of those who cannot help themselves, we have a duty to seek insight, to understand, and to lend a hand.

I do not know what became of that man. I do not know whether he got the help he so desperately needed, nor do I know to what degree the healthcare team displayed mercy that night. For his own sake and the sake of those that have come before and those that will come after him, I hope that the doctors and nurses could see the terror in his eyes — a fear not of dying, but rather of being shut out by the system; this was his last attempt at seeking something that went beyond assistance. These individuals, for whom the promise of help is often little more than an off-hand statement, deserve validation, deserve support because life — whatever else it may be — is fleeting. What right do any of us possess to have a hand in that transience, except in attempts to stave it off?