Why I Didn’t Become a Psychiatrist

Four years ago today, as my high school friends and I were filling up forms pertaining to what specific jobs we
wanted after college, as by that time we were applying for senior high school, and every other adult was apparently
suddenly really interested in my plans, I didn’t actually know what I was supposed to answer. I didn’t know what I
wanted. But, because I didn’t want to reveal that I was a hopeless teenager who was bound to be doomed because she
didn’t have dreams, the next person who asked me what I wanted to be, I replied the safest I could muster, “I’m going to
be a psychiatrist”.

At fifteen, I knew that a psychiatrist was a doctor who took care of patients who suffer from mental illnesses, and
that while the number of cases relating to mental health increased through the years, not enough psychiatrists existed in
the Philippines, let alone facilities to provide proper care. In fact, as reported in 2014, “there were only 490 psychiatrists
for 100 million Filipinos, and that less than 5% of general practitioners have knowledge on assessment and management
of common mental health problems like depression,” as stated by Dr. Dinah Nadera, a psychiatrist and professor of the
University of the Philippines Open University. The title made me feel like I was going to be a hero if it were to become
mine, but I didn’t know enough to understand that I was going to bear the weight of 3.3 million Filipinos suffering form
depression alone. Today, the Philippines has the highest number of depressed people in Southeast Asia, and the National
Statistics Office reported mental illness as the third most common form of disability.

And although society’s perception of mental illnesses has grown more positive over the years, another problem
emerged as mental health has become a topic for romanticism and mislabeling of differential mental conditions. Another
problem in particular is that in the Philippines, we describe ourselves as some of the happiest people in Earth that
admitting to feeling any lesser than that is deemed unacceptable. In a Filipino Reddit thread titled “Serial Killers in the
Philippines “, users even reasoned out that happy people like Filipinos wouldn’t have mishandled their own problems and
resort to murders instead, hence why there wouldn’t be much serial killers in the country. While sometimes, we do
acknowledge the existence of persons with actual mental illnesses, but we overestimate it and mistake their illness for
their entirety.

A person I knew suffered from a declining mental health when she was sixteen, and she wrote about how it was
more difficult to deal with the aftermaths of taking rat poison than dealing with her condition that led her into it in the first
place. She said that she “felt weak, and that the more people knew what she did, the more their stares unknowingly judged
her for being vulnerable”. This is what stigma means: we unintentionally treat someone as inferior, and eventually
associate negative attributes because of certain aspects of their life. We don’t always want to corner someone and view
them differently, but we can’t help label people who’ve battled with a mental illness. Some of us can’t help but joke that
any mentally disabled child is a ‘mongoloid’, and we can’t not assume that schizophrenics are dangerous, or that those
with depressive episodes are unstable and fragile. The next thing we know, we become too conscious of another person’s
weakness that we make them feel afraid and incompetent. These are a few examples, but think about all the other people
who’d have to deal with the feelings of shame and isolation after being labelled as the ‘mentally unstable’ or the
‘annoyingly sensitive’, the reluctance to ask for help, the lack of understanding by family, and friends, fewer opportunities
to grow and recover, self-doubt, and many more.

When I used to tell people what I wanted to be, they’d jokingly ask why I wanted a job taking care of ‘crazies’,
and that there’s no glory in being a doctor that deals with either ‘fake illnesses’, because according to them, “there is no
point in treating something that can be overcome by putting your will into it,” or irreversible diseases, as if those who’ve
lost parts of them or maybe the whole of it are no longer human beings to start with. Eventually, I quit aiming for the
field, and whether it was because I was discouraged by these remarks, or I never really had enough passion to get away
with it, only proves that I was never bound to be a psychiatrist anyway. I can only wish that more people wouldn’t be as
ignorant as I was to the real reason why psychiatrists are needed, and may we continue to grow one step ahead into an
informed and knowledgeable community.