July 16, 2010

Anxiety—College Boy Problems

handicapped sign
Before I met with Peter, the 21-year old college boy with anxiety, I asked his parents if there was anything they were concerned about. He said, “Well, it would be great if he were a little more outgoing.” I hadn’t seen the boy in a couple of years and didn’t really know him well since he didn’t go to the doctor much. Was he shy?

An hour or so later, with them waiting patiently outside the exam room, I knew he had a full-blown anxiety disorder. Many people have some anxiety in certain situations, like public speaking. Some people have more focused anxiety about specific things, like spiders or heights. Some have anxiety about things that they themselves know intellectually to be fairly harmless to most other people, such as a fear of balloons. Some fears are so unusual that the person is able to talk about them freely, and knows that they are not an issue for everyone else they have ever met, but the fear is quite real to them. Perhaps a great thing about the internet is that it can give this last group of people the ability to connect with the 1 or 2 or 5 other people who share their unusual problem. By example, there is a community, of sorts, for those with a fear of buttons.

He lived at home with his parents. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. His parents were nice people and nice to him. And they never threatened to kick him out. They probably never would. That’s a nice thing, too.

But he never indicated that there might be advantages to living away from his parents. More than that, he couldn’t fathom why anybody his age would want to move away from home. It wasn’t like he was so emotionally tied to his parents. I had spoken with them, though not about him. They went on vacation, sometimes camping. They went out to the movies sometimes. Most of the time, I learned from Peter, he never wanted to go. I could picture a dysfunctional relationship in which he didn’t want them to leave, but he never objected. He was most comfortable just staying at home. Alone.

He wasn’t psychotic about his anxiety. He didn’t believe (or say he believed) that if he rode the bus then the world would end by a volcano emerging under his suburban town just as a meteor hit the earth causing an rip in the space-time continuum which would provide an attack opportunity for the Monsters from the Id.

Still, I had a bad feeling about where this was heading. Unlike the College Girl I had seen just a day before, he was not tortured by his anxiety. He knew that others weren’t as concerned as he was about many things, but the way he thought was obvious. Every unusual fear was completely reasonable, and he was almost bemused about the mad foolishness he witnessed around him. To him, our riding in vehicles of all kinds appeared like those who walk tightropes over great gorges. He saw that people did it, that they could do it regularly, but you’d have to be positively nuts actually to try it.

This is also how he saw the pursuit of human relationships. This was another big difference with the College Girl. She didn’t have a boyfriend and wanted one. She absolutely did understand why her peers were in or wanted to be in a relationship. She also understood what was keeping her from achieving this goal. She perceived her anxiety as a handicap that she hated, a roadblock she was desperate to overcome and was so far unsuccessful at doing so.

Was he really forthcoming with me? Like every patient, he was entitled to his privacy and owed me no explanation. Some doctors, I know, think that if a patient isn’t open about something, or if a patient fabricates something, then they can’t or shouldn’t help them. It’s certainly an impediment to treatment when a person doesn’t seem to respond to medication that they say they are taking but aren’t. But mostly if patients want me to give them my best advice and they want advice based on some hypothetical situation, that’s what I and they will be stuck with.

Is this denial? Once I saw a child who had been in and out of emergency rooms at least 4 or 5 times over several months. Every time the family went in with him, he had trouble breathing. He was given breathing treatments and medication and sent home to follow up with his primary care physician. They didn’t give him the medication, didn’t make the follow up appointments. They needed a form filled out for school, and the doctor told them that the child had asthma and would benefit from better control of his symptoms. They changed doctors, and came to the practice where I used to work. I told them their child had asthma and would benefit from better control of his symptoms. He went to the ER again, then they asked for their records to be transferred to another practice.

Is it my job to puncture his denial, if it is? Is it my role to judge his life decisions as somehow inadequate, as incompatible with happiness? Is my definition of happiness and success as an adult a reasonable goal? There are societal norms, of course, and he was aware of these. Marriage, family, work, kids, and so on. Certainly here in one of the epicenters of alternative lifestyles, there aren’t a lot of choices that wouldn’t be tolerated. Besides, I lived in Utah for 3 years. In ways that I appreciate more from a distance—topographical, chronological, and metaphorical—some of those people were very much willing to do a lot to live outside of the mainstream. Whether in shallow swamps of consanguine genes or in isolated heavily-armed bunkers waiting for the race-war end-of-times, they were going to do it their way.

Let me be explicit about some of the ethical issues associated with this case.

1. If the patient doesn’t think it’s a problem, is it a problem? Before there were Wall Street executives who didn’t take any responsibility in their congressional testimony, there was a panel of Tobacco CEOs who swore under oath that they didn’t believe that smoking caused health problems. That seemed sleazy and dishonest. But if a patient says that they are just fine with what they are doing, does it matter if they are in denial or are out of touch with reality?  Does the doctor have an obligation to do more than educate, inform, and offer help?

2. Is Peter hurting anyone else by his inattention to his anxiety disorder? Sure, his parents had dreams for him that might be difficult to achieve. But who among us has parents who have always thought that we would be exactly who we are now? I am, to be blunt, worried that what appears typical enough at the moment—a college kid living at home while attending a decent and popular local institution—could become more cumbersome as the years go by. Do his parents deserve a life of their own, without their kids? Do their kids owe them the freedom gained by moving the heck out of the house at some point? And the parents aren’t my patient, so should I care what they need?

3. I want to repeat that last part. The parents aren’t my patient. This is an easy issue for some of the patients I see. I have a patient who’s nearly 30 now, severely developmentally delayed. I have autistic kids who are technically autistic adults. It’s an easy issue for them because they have legal guardians and decision-makers. Not Peter—he’s warm and smart and going to college. But in some ways, obviously from these essays, I think of him as having a handicap. It’s not politically-correct, I know, to use that term at all. But there’s something about him, that is with him in every setting, that often interferes with his achievement of some of his own goals. It interferes, in my professional opinion, with his ability to meet some criteria of independent—if not happy, perhaps—adulthood. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 says a covered disability is a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity. What, if anything, should I tell his parents? That their kid is sick and needs to have medication spiked into his orange juice? I want to tell them everything. They are his best advocates, they know something isn’t right. He gets along well with them. Shouldn’t they be there to encourage him to seek the help I think he needs? A lot of parents read this, and would probably agree. But what about when you were 20—would you have wanted your doctor calling your parents?

2 comments:

  1. I am not an anxious person, but I got queezy reading the last two posts.

    Did you get permission from your patient before posting his most intimate fears? Posting this man's fears is incredibly private information.

    I am concerned about how your blog could effect this patient. While you write that you are concerned with patient privacy, there is a lot of identifying information in this post. What if the patient, or a friend reads it? Or his parents? Or friends of his parents?

    Can you consider changing identifying details (such as number of siblings, birth order, etc.) and posting a disclaimer in the future?

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  2. Response to the comment from Anonymous concerning identifying information.

    It's possible that if a problem is unusual enough, the patient or perhaps a child's direct family will identify with what I have written. And that's certainly possible in this case.

    Please note that in all of these unusual cases, I have either asked the family/patient for permission, or I have tried very hard to change key identifying information. Hopefully, the patient described seems identifiable. But I have intentionally changed certain important factors in nearly all the posts of this blog. All the names are changed, of course. Often, the genders are different. The age is usually changed, but for the case to be meaningful, I have to keep patients in the same developmental/educational level. Because it's the Summer, I've been seeing more college students than I typically do during the academic term.

    Often, I combine aspects of one patient's story with aspects from another. It is very much my intention that somebody could read these and think that they know some child or person just like the one I describe. I want to illustrate something, perhaps a problem, illness, or unresolved issue that comes up in my work. And part of the idea is to make the patient described have traits that many can relate to.

    In the case of this College Boy, I have described issues that have come up with others as if they applied to him. By doing so, I have the opportunity to illustrate, in particular, the two important issues I bring up at the end--how to manage non-minor patients with problems that might be helped by their parents, and where the balance is between confronting denial of some patients while keeping the channels of communication open.

    Yet these cases are based on real people. In his case, I have absolutely not mentioned or even hinted at anything of private concern that might have come up in our visit. When you say there's a lot of identifying information in this post, that's only sort of right. There's a lot of identifying information but a lot of it simply wasn't about him. Perhaps you read these last 2 posts and thought that you recognized him. I won't say you're wrong, but one of my points is that anxiety is more common than we think, and we need to reach out to these children even if they aren't complaining.

    I would never want to hurt anybody's feelings, nor compromise their privacy. If Peter (neither 20 nor named Peter) were to read this, I think he probably would recognize aspects of himself. But he would also know that he doesn't have some of the important problems I mentioned as his. And he certainly would know that I have not hinted at any other issues that might have come up. These are real, however, and I have seen them in several patients over the past few months.

    Still, I will try harder than ever to make patient identification impossible. And thank you for the comment--I take it quite seriously and will make changes based on it.

    ReplyDelete

Please let me know what you think. Do you know a child or situation like this?