Sue Wootton
From memory, for memory, and in memory.
I used to have a physiotherapy clinic in central Dunedin. One Friday evening I farewelled my final patient and began to tidy up before heading home. It had been a busy week and I was exhausted. Already mentally off-duty, I wandered into the waiting room to stack the magazines, and to my surprise and annoyance found two men sitting there. In an American drawl, one of them said, “My friend here needs an appointment.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but the clinic is closed.”
The man persisted. “This is very important,” he said. “He needs an appointment now.”
I glanced at the friend. He was certainly holding himself rigidly, as if in pain. But the very idea of treating one more patient that day was too much for me. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, “but I am closing now.”
The man amped up his appeal. It’s urgent; it’s necessary; it has to be done and you have to do it.
My ears are full of screaming: the name-calling, the CAPS, the exclamation points!!! Whenever vaccination comes up online, and comments are enabled, the conversation quickly devolves into an extremity of outrage and vitriol that reads to me like ‘moral panic.’
“If you were to be crass, you could say there is a bit of a flavour of the month about it,” former Health Minister David Caygill says about mental health, during a conversation in a Christchurch cafe. It does sound crass, but it’s true. The shortfalls of our mental health system are a constant topic of discussion at the dinner table, in Parliament and in the media. Headlines claiming the system is “broken” or “on a knife edge” are frequent, and hard to ignore. You don’t have to look far to find a story about a mental health advocate calling for an independent review, or a grieving family member whose child killed themselves while in the care of services.
I trained as a physiotherapist nearly thirty years ago, and worked in acute medicine and neuro rehabilitation in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. I ended my clinical practice about seven years back, and strangely I don’t miss it terribly; one moves onto other things.