Angele Beaudoin, a Canadian family physician, was hospitalized in 2012 after suffering a mental emotional crisis. She has a lot to say after being on the receiving end of the mental health care system.
Angele echoed the one word we have heard from so many people with lived experience—their need for Hope. Even though her medical education emphasized that a patient should never leave the doctors office without Hope, she was shocked to find that she was given no Hope for recovery from her condition when she was the patient.
Angele was given a clear message from the medical establishment and her psychiatrist: that her medications were for life and the pathological process occurring in Angele’s brain might prove irreversible if she ever stopped taking her medications. After leaving the hospital Angele was able to significantly reduced her medications to 1/6 what she was prescribed by her own titration!
We have heard some of the same themes over and over again from people that have experienced a mental emotional crisis. First, they wish that early in their process they found that there was Meaning in their suffering. And secondly, they wish that they were given Hope for recovery instead of being presented with a life long sentence from a brain disease.
It seems the way the often terrifying experience of an extreme emotional state is framed and contextualized by one’s environment and culture has a profound impact on the persons outcome.
