I started training in medicine in 1995, the day before my 18th birthday.
They got me young and scrawny. I grew up around medicine, surgery and psychiatry, in hospitals and clinics around Melbourne and regional Victoria. Sadly, the more I saw, the less hope I felt for the healing capacity I had signed up to be trained in.
Sure, that girl got better after we took her appendix out, that old man’s lungs are now clearer of fluid, and this middle-aged woman hears fewer voices when we make her have an injection once a fortnight.
Our treatments kept them all out of trouble. Or out of sight at least. For the time being.
It wasn’t enough for me, especially once I saw the girl back in ED with chronic abdominal pain, the old man in the morgue, and the middle-aged woman shouting at no one in the supermarket car park.
This is not to say that surgery, medicine and general psychiatry couldn’t help more effectively beyond the immediate term. I saw it happen and filled with some of that much-needed hope, tried to find out what made the difference.
What made healthcare into healing?
Well, decades later, I have answers, many of them.
None of them short.
I have tried to articulate these answers to my patients, and in writing and presentations, to colleagues, students and readers. Passion and enthusiasm I do, brevity not so much.
Now, it happens that another social movement wanting to heal people – and maybe a nation too – has found what I want to say in just two powerful words:
Recognition and voice.
Our patients heal best from their suffering when we recognise them. Firstly we recognise their universal humanity, rights and worth.
Secondly we recognise their belonging to groups within our population, such as by identity, ethnicity, gender or age, but also by the patterns of their experience, behaviour and biological data that make them like others and predict what might help them.
Thirdly, we recognise their uniqueness, how they have their fingerprints all over their lives, relationships, choices and efforts to cope.
Then there’s voice.
Our patients, recognised for who they are as they are, may be better able to find their voice as we need to hear it, to help them heal. When you speak your truth and someone who matters listens, it changes things in your brain and body. Research has shown us that it’s much harder to tell a story to someone who’s been told to keep a still face: you can’t find your voice unless you can see a face that shows someone’s listening.
I saw enough examples of surgical, medical and psychiatric patients heal better with recognition and voice, to decide to find an area of medicine where I got to do more healing that way. That’s why I’m now a psychotherapist and teacher of psychotherapy. I prescribe medications rarely: most of my patients get better through healing themselves with my recognition and their voice.
I am grateful to the Yes movement for these two beautiful words, that describe the healing I have witnessed for nearly 30 years now, and light the way for the healing I hope to help with in the future. The recognition they seek is, as in my line of work, about the universal humanity of First Nations peoples, their group belonging, and their individual uniqueness. The voice they seek needs to know that those who matter are listening.
This isn’t medicine, it’s politics I know, but most politics concerns what will make things better, what the best medicine is for our ailments. Governing for the whole country? Whole is just another way of saying healed, the words have the same roots.
I hope our country votes to give First Nations people the recognition and voice they have asked for, because without those two essential things, healing will be so much harder and take so much longer.
Right now, the polls are not good, and I am worried.
I’ve seen so much medicine done without recognition or voice, and it ends back in ED, in the morgue, or in a shopping centre carpark.
As I thought back then, and I still think now: We can do better than this.
My Doctor's Handwriting 