I’m a Mental Health Professional — Here’s Why I Lie About My Job
One of my friends who is a psychiatrist recently confessed to me that he no longer shares his vocation with people he meets at parties; instead, he regales with them with cheery anecdotes from his (fake) life as an interior decorator.
This fib, my friend tells me, is dual purpose: it repeals the possibility that a new person meeting him will experience him through the “well, what does he think about me” lens while also allowing my friend to remain unmolested by the curious attention mental health professionals seem to receive in social situations.
Being a psychiatrist is akin to being a pretty bisexual with a lot of tattoos at a party: people want to ask you questions. They treat the curiosity they have in your non-traditional lifestyle as as an invitation to be part of it.
Can I ask you about my uncle, inquired a girl I met at a Christmas party for the local animal shelter where we are both volunteers, I think he might be an alcoholic.
A writer I met briefly at a story-telling competition last year asked me what I did for work; three tequila shots later, they stared deeply into my eyes and asked if I thought their fetish for “mommy stuff” was okay. Strangers suggest such conversation topics as the rash on their thigh or the question of their grandmother’s bipolar disorder. Hairdressers, snipping my split ends, grill me about melatonin and St. John’s Wort. Recently, a guy I haven’t seen in over ten years DM’d me to ask if I thought he should go to rehab for marijuana.
Given the spooky persona of mental illness in the media, I try to be as direct and informative as I can in my responses — so I make a good impression, and people are less scared of psychiatry? Not sure? — but there is a group of people I will not tolerate this shit from anymore.
I can blow off randos at dinner parties because they are laypeople, and because I (mostly) believe that their foolishness is a result of ignorance rather than malcontent. The people I do hold to a higher standard, my fellow medical professionals, are those who have received the training they need to approach psychiatric illness with sensitivity and compassion.
Hahah.
JK.
Providers, nurses, and EMTs have some of the most volatile attitudes towards the mentally ill that I have witnessed. On the three-year anniversary of opening my last clinic, a group of doctors and nurse practitioners gathered around a table to commemorate the event with a photo. Everyone wanted to be in the picture, which left no one to be photographer, so someone jokingly suggested we fetch a patient from the waiting room to snap it for us.
Well, don’t get one of Rachel’s patients, piped a pediatrician from the back, they’ll shoot up the place!
I promise you, there is nothing spooky, sexy, or mystifying about chronic mental illness. Psychotic people are generally pretty quiet. Some days I get bored prescribing medications to treat the side effects of other medications. Psychiatric visits aren’t so different from yearly physicals: routine appointments to ensure that your systems are functioning properly.
I am proud of what I do for a living, and I am proud of my patients who make big or even incremental changes that happen glacially over the years, but I may jump on my psychiatrist friend’s bandwagon and start lying to the strangers I socialize with about my occupation. It’s confusing to be treated as both an outcast and a saint at the same birthday party, receiving dueling comments like That’s weird and You’re doing God’s work! while waiting in line for the bathroom.
I hope this won’t always be the case: perhaps one day there will be enough mental health providers in this country that my job won’t be considered rare; that a script for antidepressants is perceived like a script for ibuprofen 800; that suicidal people will always find their way to my door just in time.
Until then, remember that the interior decorator you just met is probably diagnosing you.
