A remarkable coping mechanism helped me survive parts of my childhood, and I find I need to give a heads-up about it to anyone who treats me in a medical setting. While chatting about it at last year’s ACEs Conference in San Francisco, Dr. Vince Felitti asked me to write an article for The Permanente Journal about my experiences with the medical community, as a person with a childhood-trauma-related, but mostly invisible, mental health disorder.
And, of course, who can say “No” to Dr. Felitti? The article, “A Patient’s View of the Challenges and Blessings of Her Dissociative Disorder” is now available online and will be in the February print version of The Permanente Journal. On the basis of my own, sometimes funny experiences, I offer some instructive anecdotes and tips for health care practitioners on how to work with patients with a trauma-related diagnosis such as a dissociative disorder.
It can be quite surprising, even alarming, to be a physician working with compassionate professionalism on an apparently normal, well-educated, older woman and suddenly watch her affect, voice, and symptoms morph into a 6-year-old who wants to play games with the equipment—or a terrified 11-year-old who is sure you want to perform painful medical experiments on her. Sometimes, as happened in a recent Emergency Department (ED) visit, even when I manage to warn the staff about my disorder, the information lands in the chart without leading to understanding, opening the possibility of dangerous consequences. Not that we who live with the condition are inherently dangerous, but we can be unpredictable.
Read the article here: https://www.thepermanentejourn...020/winter/7305.html
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