Greg Smith is a psychiatrist.
You know the headlines. You read them and hear them and see them every day.
Someone gets angry at the system and shoots someone or several someones in cold blood, often having planned the act, gathered the necessary firepower and ammunition ahead of time, stalked the victims, checked the schedules and shown up at the right time to do maximum damage.
A family including mother and young children in a van are …
“51-year old female presents today with …”
Funny, the vast majority of my clinical notes last week began with that phrase, give or take a year or two. Women in their fifties who saw me in the clinic, who I spoke to via television in my telepsychiatry practice, or who I interacted with in some other way. It struck me as odd that so many women of similar age came to …
“My grandson has HDHD.”
This was intriguing. I had just asked her one of my standard psychiatric interview questions about family history of mental illness. Maybe I hadn’t heard right, but it sounded like she was telling me about a new flat screen. Had her grandson just bought a fifty-two inch LED set in time to watch the Final Four this weekend? Had he mounted it on the wall on …
fatigue |fəˈtēg|
noun
1 extreme tiredness, typically resulting from mental or physical exertion or illness : he was nearly dead with fatigue.
• a reduction in the efficiency of a muscle or organ after prolonged activity.
No, this post is not a part of my twenty six installment Psychiatry A to Z series.
You’ll have to wait for the next one in that group, which by the way will be looking at a “T” word. …
Your mother has been up all night.
She has Alzheimer’s Disease and now it has progressed to that inevitable stage of the dementing process where she is paranoid, agitated, and confused. She fidgets and paces and walks all day. She gets out of bed multiple times each night. She has gone out the door into the back yard and tried to escape to the street, wearing only her night clothes. Sometimes …
It is hard to believe that those we love will die.
We can’t bear it. It’s too harsh, too complicated, too fraught with emotional baggage and unfinished business and things never said. It’s too final. Dead is dead, after all. From the moment of our birth, we are dying. Death can be painful, tragic, too soon, too quick, too slow, too easy, or too hard.
So we soften it up a bit.
She …
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