Little changes

My newest favourite lunchtime hangout is the paediatric psych ward.

Our first visit there was probably my creepiest experience as a medical student, second only to observing autopsies at the morgue. The inpatients had just finished group therapy, so it was one long corridor of expressionless children in checkered pyjamas - one kid every five metres - waiting to return to their rooms. As if it wasn't bad enough, the entire place was also washed over by a sallow tint by the crappy lighting as per our usual hospital-last-renovated-thirty-years-ago standards. Then the case we were assigned was a psychotic girl who giggled to herself and had big, round eyes that stared into nothing ninety percent of the time. I was so freaked out the first time she squealed and flailed her arms around without warning I think I must've jumped half a metre backwards.

I suppose it also had a lot to do with the stereotyped expectations I had of psychiatric patients before I met any - omg those crazies are going to take my eyes out and feed them to their imaginary puppies - but they all seemed to like me enough not to attack (or maybe they think I'm one of them). There's also a hyperactive kid who claims to hate medical students but filled us in with all the ward gossip, a catatonic girl who is super pale and shuffles around in pink slippers, a couple more who I'm not too familiar with, and a blue-eyed Caucasian boy who completely owned me in Labyrinth (you know, that wooden maze that you tilt different directions with the knobs on the side to navigate a silver bead through without dropping it into the holes along the way?) - needless to say, I've grown rather fond of them.

It's quite sad, really, because they're good kids, they really are. They too have aspirations about careers and life, they want to go to school, have friends and fit in, but sometimes their condition takes over and makes them do horrible things they can't help, then they get admitted and it's weeks to months before they get discharged because it takes that long to titrate the medications to just the right levels. By then, everyone has heard of what's happened and becomes afraid of them. There have been numerous efforts made to reduce stigmatisation - we've already changed the names of the disorders from retardation to delay, advocated to social enterprises to get patients jobs, rented billboards to advertise their normalcy - so there's not a lot more that is in my power to change things. What I can do, though, is to spare a few hours a week, show the kids a little love, write about it afterwards and hopefully remould stereotyped opinions, one reader at a time. (: