Switching Time: A Doctor's Harrowing Story of Treating a Woman with 17 Personalities

Book by Baer Richard

Chapter 1

Staying Alive

Part One

1.

False Start

It’s January 11, 1989, and I walk down the narrow corridor, past the two other therapists’ offices, to the waiting room to fetch Karen. She sits in the corner with her head bent, fidgeting with her purse strap. She’s twenty-nine years old but looks older; she’s overweight, with a round face, unkempt short brown hair that curls at the ends, brown eyes, gold-rimmed glasses, and a jagged, semicircular scar running up the middle of her forehead. Her clothes are tidy, but her black cotton pants and brown top don’t ask to be noticed. She wears no makeup or jewelry except a wedding band. She looks up as I approach. Her eyes say, Hi, I’m sorry, I give up.

“Come right in,” I say, and she walks past me in a way that is slow, self-effacing, apologetic, and helpless. There’s a physical and emotional heaviness about her, an inertia that seems old and solid.

I’m a young psychiatrist; thirty-seven is young in this business. I’m a little over six feet tall, with sprinkles of gray in my formerly dark brown hair, and I once had a gay patient who described me as having boyish good looks. I’ve been in practice for seven years, practicing part of the time in a working-class suburb south of Chicago. The patients I see here are mainly housewives who are depressed or anxious, a few middle-age manic-depressives, and

several elderly patients with what used to be called involutional melancholia, the depressive illness that is common in old age. I also see a few high-functioning schizophrenics and a couple of people in religious life. This is a good place to practice because of the wide variety of psychiatric illnesses I get to observe—and almost all the patients are covered by generous union medical insurance. I also have an office in downtown Chicago where I work the other half of the time, seeing my psychoanalytic patients and a handful of others.

This suburban office, which I share on alternate days with

Dr. Gonzalez, is in a brown-brick, three-story 1970s office building situated between strip malls, car dealerships, and fast-food restaurants. The office is sparely appointed. It has a large oak desk with two chairs facing it and a small corner table with a modest arrangement of artificial silk flowers, a gift from my wife. A window spanning most of one wall gives a view of the traffic on 95th Street. The walls are off-white, and the carpeting and furniture are a mixture of browns. Except for the window, there are few distractions.

Karen settles in the chair facing my desk and sighs.

“What brings you to see me?” I ask. I use this standard opening line because it encourages the person to begin confiding their troubles without putting them on the defensive. Nearly all the alternatives— What do you want? What’s wrong with you? I understand you’re depressed . . .—are off-putting.

Karen shifts uneasily, trying to find a comfortable position. She’s too big for the chair, although her posture, compact and turned slightly to the side, makes her look smaller.

“I’ve been . . . depressed . . . for the past three and a half years,” she says. Before she speaks, she takes a quick breath, which gives the impression of hesitation, and her speech is full of effort and reluctance. She pauses.

“Never depressed before that?” I ask.

She shrugs, but shakes her head.

“Any problems with depression growing up?”

Another head shake.

“No, I had no problems until the birth of my second child, my daughter, by cesarean section.” She briefly describes her hospital stay. “I still have pain.” Karen sighs again, gathering strength.

“The doctors ended up taking out part of my lung through an incision on my back.” She points along a line from her right breast to her spine. “I was sick for a long time and I couldn’t be with

my baby right away.” Moisture appears in Karen’s eyes. “I couldn’t breast-feed, and my two-and-a-half-year-old son rejected me when I finally came home.”

She tells me she’d been put on antidepressant medication and painkillers, although the painkillers made her more depressed. I know that for patients with chronic pain, depression is common. The rest of her life must be suffering, too.

“How are things going at home, now?” I ask. She shrugs again, apologetic and helpless. She talks to me as if each word has to be urged out, as if an internal force is interfering with her telling me what’s wrong. Her words come out so slowly that I almost lose my concentration waiting for them.

“My marriage has crumbled since the baby. My husband and I aren’t getting along.” Karen’s speech is halting now and she looks humiliated. “I’ve gained a hundred pounds since the baby was born. People walk all over me; I can’t say no to them.” She pauses and looks to me for a response, but I don’t yet know enough to make any comments, so I just wait for more. Karen shifts again and continues.

“I cry all the time and I’ve stopped working because of the pain. When I’m home, my pain is worse, but when I’m outside, the pain is better.” She looks away, then back at me. “I feel guilty about being sick, and I feel I owe my family for helping me.”

“You owe them?”

“Because they’ve had to help me . . .” She turns her head away again to escape my looking at her.

She goes on to say she wakes during the night and can’t get back to sleep, and doesn’t care anymore. She has no energy, she cries, she can’t concentrate, and she stopped taking the medication she was on. . . .

As I listen, I see a woman unable to help herself. She presents herself as a victim, almost insisting on the role, and I feel a twinge of impatience. I know she has depression, with symptoms that can be helped by medication, but I also sense she possesses character traits that contribute to her depression and will make treating her illness more difficult.

After listening to her story, I ask my standard list of mental-status questions. It’s clear she has significant depression, but she denies having any suicidal thoughts. I decide to treat her depressive symptoms with medication and leave the character traits alone. I ask her to come back to see me next week. She accepts the prescription obediently and leaves the office. My spirits raise a little as I see her go.

I don’t think about Karen again until she returns the next week. She says she feels better, sleeps better, although she still

feels sad.

“I’ve had some light-headedness from the medication,” she says, picking at some lint on her slacks. “I’m not sure I like the idea of pills.”

“I think they can help you,” I say. “I recommend we continue with them.”

“Okay,” she says softly.

“How else have you been feeling?”

“I still have pain, which starts at my neck and goes down my back and around under my breast, here.” She points to her chest. Karen repeats the complaints of our previous session. I can’t say no to people. I feel guilty because my mother helped me when I was sick, and now I owe her. I try to satisfy everybody. My marriage hasn’t recovered from my illness. . . .

With all of these things I feel I can offer only limited help. She never offers a hint of what she herself is doing to solve her

problems—she simply suffers. I listen to her with that twinge of annoyance growing inside me again. It’s important for a therapist to be aware of his or her own reaction to a patient and try to learn from it. Is this irritation felt by the other people in Karen’s life? I wonder. I suggest to Karen that she can change her life if she wants to and that she needn’t be as helpless as she now feels. I give her several examples using situations she’s mentioned, and suggest how she might make more assertive choices to alter the self-defeating patterns she’s following. She offers excuses why that’s not possible and I realize I’m talking to a stone. I double her medication and ask her to come back in two weeks.

. . .

When Karen returns, her hands are trembling. She’s dressed as before; she has on different clothes, but the drab, tidy impression is the same. Her forehead is creased with lines down the middle. She shifts in her chair and looks at me; her eyes are sad.

“I can’t sleep . . . at night,” she says softly, tentatively, beginning a litany of complaints that I’m familiar with from our last two

sessions.

“Do you think about hurting yourself?” I ask. Anyone who’s this depressed and helpless must think about it. Karen starts to cry a little.

“Occasionally I think about killing myself,” she says, but quickly adds, “I don’t think I’d really do anything.”

As I listen to her talk about the things that weigh on her but that she makes no effort to rid herself of, I feel my irritation with her grow. She talks in a reluctant monotone and resists my interruptions, and when I make a suggestion, she nods dutifully but

goes right on as if I’d said nothing. I feel as if, in her passive way, she’s walking all over me. She seems determined to wallow and rut around in these self-defeating emotions. In my own mind, I try to separate the symptoms of her major depressive episode from her passive, self-defeating personality traits. I want to focus on treating the depression, which should be a short-term task. I don’t really want to intervene with the personality traits; they’re a very long-term task. I f...