I made excuses for over two years before allowing my male primary care doctor to complete a thorough physical exam. He turned down my request to be examined by a female physician. Over time I agreed to be examined by my male doctor because I was afraid of being branded as too demanding and unreasonable.
Just this past month, a landmark class action lawsuit was filed to address the pervasive public health problem of childhood trauma. Filed by Public Counsel, the lawsuit seeks to mandate the integration of trauma-informed practices in schools in Compton, CA.
Schools in every corner of the United States serve children who have experienced homelessness or are currently homeless. Nearly 2.5 million children are now homeless in our country each year—that’s one out of thirty children. Children in our schools have lived on the streets, in cars, and in motels. They’ve moved in and out of crowded emergency shelters. They've experienced severe violence, abuse, neglect, and hunger. Traumatic events like these occur before or during homelessness, or too often both.
I remember when I was first doing clinical training we had an advanced psychopathology course every Wednesday after rounds. When we started, we looked at the syllabus and there were a number of familiar texts: the DSM-IV-TR, and Adult Psychopathology and Diagnosis. But sprinkled throughout the texts were other readings: Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Rilke. After we’d had a moment to look it over the teacher said, You will no doubt notice that there are a number of texts that you have not seen before. This is because I assume that your clinical training to be largely complete. Otherwise how would you get here? But now you have to learn what things actually look like. And, over the course of my career, I have found that anywhere a psychiatrist would go a great writer has been there before and has described it better.
