Thank you

Some doctors see their patients as patients, others see them as people. I have been privileged to experience a psychiatrist who worked for my best interests deep down, a psychiatrist that led me to the path to freedom.

When I was seventeen, I started secretly cutting. My father had just left the family home and I was dealing with ongoing sexual abuse by the hands of my grandfather, abuse that no grandchild should ever have to experience.

I had ECT and was put on mood stabilisers, anti-psychotics and anti-depressants. They threw the book at me and didn’t know where to turn to next. It wasn’t until I fell under the care of Dr Mulgrew that things began to turn around. She brought me out of myself. Doctors come and go but the lessons she taught me have moulded me into the person I am today.

She was my doctor for only nine months yet it was under her care that I felt heard for the first time. She was a very straight woman who told it like it was and as I was self-harming about four to five times daily, she knew she would have to put a stop to that. I was told I will never get rid of my illness but that the symptoms should one day decrease and an underlying issue would submerge.

Dr Mulgrew had a three-strike rule. She said that if I self-harmed three times it was immediate discharge. It wasn’t until it happened that I realised she was different. She made me come in every week day for two weeks at 8:30 in the morning and spent thirty minutes with me before her workday began. She wanted to see dedication from me, dedication to my recovery. I proved that to her by getting up every morning and making the effort to board a busy train after which I had to navigate an equally busy Luas. After the two weeks she readmitted me.

When she took me back in the slate was clean and I had my three strikes back. I don’t trust easily, but she proved trustworthy in those intensive thirty-minute sessions every morning. She showed she cared and even though she wasn’t a very warm woman she was dedicated to finding the source of my pain.

From then on, she still gave me more time than her other patients. She was the first doctor I confided in that I had suffered sexual abuse at the hand of my grandfather and that the abuse went on for eight years. She could then see the underlying condition that made my self-harming as bad and as frequent as it was. She was the one who first offered me a place to voice my deepest darkest secret. She knew I had one in there and maybe that’s why she dedicated so much time to me. Was it her in my dark mind looking around with the flashlight, or had she coaxed me into holding it to search for the underlying issue myself?

I will forever be in her debt and was sad to see her go. She had done so much for me. She found the reason I self-harmed rather than having me wander aimlessly on a conveyor belt looking for answers I didn’t know the question to. Thank you, Dr Mulgrew. Thank you.