Week 5-Uyen Ngo

In my previous blogs, I have mentioned how conflicted I have been as someone who strongly believes in medicine but also finds part of herself believing in the spirits and spiritual realm. The part that really grasped my attention in the research paper "You Are Here" is the part describing a different approach to psychiatry. In some ways it seems like this article is addressing the questions I was previously questioning. As I am taking my psychology classes, the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual that is described is often times mentioned and sometimes it seems like professors have a very direct way of approaching diagnoses. And in some way, I feel like I have to agree. Because sometimes psychology and the whole study of mental illness becomes hard to treat if there is no way to be objective about it. It might not be a perfect way but there has to be some kind of objective measure in order to correctly identify the issue and the treatment. 

However, it was interesting to see that there is a different approach to studying psychiatry in which "phenomenological psychiatrists regard patients' symptoms as paradigmatic disturbance of embodiment and intersubjective experiences" (395). And its important that it is brought up that a "chaplain's spiritual care process could help patients transcend their emotional disturbances to connect with their "self" and reach an atarctic state of piece (396). I found this to be important because as a health care provider, you must be empathetic and understand all views and by connecting your own spiritual side, it can play a part in helping your patients do the same. The end of the article states that it argues for "the phenomenological approach to understanding psychopathology and psychiatric diagnosis. The disturbance of "self", of embodiment, and intersubjective experiences of a psychiatric patient maybe be corrected through chaplain's spiritual care process, which is an exercise in establishing reciprocal empathetic and embodied relationship" (397). I thought this was important because, like I said, I do argue for the fact that medicine must be objective because while it is not perfect, being objective gets the job done. However, for all parts of medicine, we must remember that the rules we set out, especially for diagnoses, are just guidelines. We must leave some room to bend and wonder because we must leave space to be empathetic and understand that our well being reflects onto our patients, and that is what medicine is all about. 

Works Cited

Parameshwaran Ramakrishnan. “‘You Are Here’: Locating ‘Spirituality’ on the Map of theCurrent Medical World