Crisis Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

There were two "crises" at work today. That's not surprising; I AM an Emergency Services Clinician, after all, so I expect actual mental health emergencies. What is continually puzzling, however, is the degree to which the definition of "crisis" or "emergency" varies from person to person. Some poor souls are having an "emergency" if they can't find the cake mix they bought last week at the grocery store; and, yes, they DO call the Mental Health Crisis Line about cake mix. It can be tempting, if you are the person who answers this call, to say, "Let them eat bread!" But it is a very bad idea to try to be funny when someone feels that they are having an emergency. (That's my keen clinical intuition, and excellent clinical training, talking. Heh.)

The first "crisis" today involved individuals other than the person in crisis, who called and, metaphorically, ran around, waved their arms, had hysterics and told me the same thing several different times in several different ways, and didn't I think it was horrifying? And scary? And what oh what were we gonna do?! Interestingly, when I spoke to the person "in crisis," he did not feel that he was in crisis, although he did feel that he needed to get some help. I tended to agree; he may have actually waited a bit long to seek psychiatric help, but wasn't in what I would call a crisis. Not going to kill anybody, including himself; fully in touch with reality; and appropriately asking for help.

The second situation almost had ME running around and waving my arms and having hysterics. And I did end up telling the details over and over again, to several different people. Sometimes people can be looking at a life-threatening medical situation without realizing it; not all lethal conditions present the way we expect, with profuse bleeding or sudden collapse, or any kind of drama at all. Sometimes it can be difficult to convince them to call 911 for the police or rescue squad. They say, "Oh, an ambulance ride is so expensive. I'll just drive myself (or the other person)," without realizing that they (or the other person) could be deceased by the time their car pulls into a parking space at the hospital. We human beings are so fragile; drinking water faster than we can eliminate it, or not drinking enough, or sweating too much without replacing salts, or tiny mis-firings in little nerve bundles, can be the end of us before we realize anything is wrong. I find that a little scary. We are "fearfully and wonderfully made," and our body regulation systems keep us on our tightrope remarkably well. But it is a tightrope.

Some people find it scary when another person says "Sometimes I wish I were dead." Some people find it scary to think of how easily our judgment, and our lives, can be threatened by small chemical processes in individual cells of our bodies. For some people, it's the relatively insignificant missing item that makes them question their own memory or maybe their own sanity. What terrifies me doesn't even occur to you, and what frightens you doesn't make a lot of sense to the next person. I'm not sure whether it is true that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," but it does seem to be true that we are united by the condition of fear. If we are all afraid of something, how does the fear affect how we approach each other and the rest of life?