A few months ago I had a kidney stone, and today I had scheduled a visit to the urologist. This is a transcript of the conversation we had.
“Age?" the urologist said as I opened the door.
“35,” I replied while still entering the room.
“Any diseases?" I was still closing the door.
“Diseases?" I said, not quite sure how to answer that question.
"Any diseases that you had!," he said holding a pen while looking to blank sheet of paper.
"Measles, mumps, chicken pox ..." I said as I approached the chair that was in front of his desk, where I was supposed to be seated before starting any relevant conversation.
“Any chronic, important diseases!” He shouted as he continued holding his pen with his eyes fixed on the sheet.
“Good morning!” I said as I sat on the chair. At that time the urologist looked up and made eye contact with me for the first time since I entered the room.
“Why did you come?” he looked away and stared to the paper once again.
"I had a kidney stone and I was sent here by my family doctor for a checkup.” I handed him the report my doctor gave me. The urologist took the papers and looked at his nurse, who had spent the entire time I was there typing at a computer. Then he told her, "Let's see what we can do for this sick person.”
“Where is the envelope that came with it?” he asked me, leaving the papers aside without even looking at them.
"My doctor just gave me the papers like that, I was given no envelope.”
"Listen! From now on," he took an envelope out of a drawer, “whenever you come here you bring all relevant documents inside this envelope." He then placed my doctor's report in the envelope. At this point in the conversation I did not whether to stand up and leave or take out a notebook and say, ‘Sorry, I'm just going to note down about the envelope so I do not forget it.’
"Well, tell me what's wrong with you! Any pain? Symptoms?”
"Well, I don’t have any pain anymore.”
"So, asymptomatic," he replied.
"Yes, I suppose that's the right term, well I had a kidney stone and it hurt a lot before, but since I peed it out ... all the pain is g…”
“Where is this calculus?” He asked without letting me finish my sentence.
"It’s being analyzed.”
"I don’t understand. Without the test results I cannot receive you. Did you have a x-ray of the abdomen?”
“No.”
"Well, you get that done and bring me the test results of the calculus, make an appointment for later,” he started to fill in a form for the x-ray and without even looking at me he continued, “The only thing I can tell until then is: ‘drink plenty of water.’” He passed the form to the nurse who gave it to me together with the envelope.
"Goodbye," said the nurse going looking back at her computer screen.
"Goodbye and Happy Holidays," I said, watching the scene of two people engrossed in their own worlds. I had just been a disruption in their autistic morning.
I think I can save any further comment; the conversation I transcribed is self-explanatory. You can imagine how eager I am to see that doctor again. Maybe I am especially sensitive to communication matters since I study psychology, but hearing that doctor referring to me as “sick person” felt like a screech in my ears.
There is an eternal debate between psychiatrists and psychologists about mental sickness. From the biomedical model, i.e., from the standpoint of a doctor, patients are sick, and people who have some psychological disorders are mentally ill. From the point of view of Psychology there is no such a thing as a mental illness.
I do not know if any doctor will be reading this, but the way a doctor conceives the person in front of them can make all the difference.
One of the many tasks a psychologist might have is to teach the client to think in a different way or to approach a situation from another point of view. The situation often does not change, but the way a person conceives it can cause them a depression and discourage them from doing anything or the opposite: see it as a challenge get over it. We do not realize the power our words have, the importance of the meaning behind them and how they influence our emotions, feelings, motivations and attitudes towards things.
Let’s take an example:
- Here comes my mother in law, she’s a pain in the ass; she’s probably bringing us her fucking food again!
What emotion does this sentence suggest? Is it positive or negative?
- Tomorrow my wife's mother is coming to visit us, she cooks very well and will probably bring us a delicious meal!
Did anything change? The person is the same, the situation, too, but to say one thing or another, activates a different mindset.
The same applies if you see a person who enters through the door as:
- Patient number 15 of this morning with a kidney stone.
- Alen, this tall and smiling guy whose family doctor sent him for a checkup because he recently had a kidney and I am going to ask him how he is doing and how he feels now. (On the other hand if the doctor I saw this morning would have thought this way, I would not be writing this post at this moment).
I think I made my point clear. Psychology is not only psychotherapy (nor psychoanalysis) or treating people with problems, but can be very useful in education for both, children and adults. Just as we were taught in school to think logically and analytically to solve a math problem, we can learn to use our emotions and our empathy when thinking.
Quite often the job of a psychologist is to teach their clients to think properly. Many of the depressions, neuroses and anxieties that lead us to a psychologist’s office are not "mental illnesses", they simply are thinking errors.
The urologist I saw this morning is already very old and will probably never change, but the doctors of the future, who are children today, they are still on time to have a different education.
Our education system is not made to face our daily problems. In life problems are not sorted out by subjects. There is no ‘here comes a math problem and then a language problem’ in real life. No matter how much a doctor knows about medicine if he does not know how to treat a person, patients will not go to his practice and he will not be able to help anyone. Working with people requires much more knowledge and skills that are acquired in a specific knowledge-specific discipline, such as urology.
All of us, who are already educated, are not going to go back to school to get a new education. Nevertheless we always have the choice to go to a psychologist to get to know ourselves better and improve those aspects of our personality that cause conflict.
However our children are still on time not to become the next president Bush, Osama bin Laden or any other terrorist or psychopath who lives on this planet. Those were once children, too.
According to Richard Gerver, an expert on education, we send our children to schools where their creativity is killed. The priority of our school system is to give a very academic education perpetuating the values currently existing in our world: competitiveness, capitalism, individualism, etc.
There are other educational systems whose priority is teaching the children to think for themselves, develop their own personality, their emotional intelligence, debating about the values they are given by their parents and society, giving them the freedom to accept them or believe in something different.
Would you dare to send your children to a school like that, despite the fact that they may smart you out and even disagree with your core religious, moral or ethical values? Or would you prefer they follow the herd and have a traditional education according to your own preferences about what they should believe in and how they should behave or be?
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