You might think the hardest working shrink in the world would be in LA or NYC, dealing with rich neurotics. Or, perhaps this person is working with the armed forces, helping soldiers deal with the tragedies of war.
But you would be wrong. The clear winner for the hardest working shrink in the world goes to … [tabla roll please] ….
Ganesan, the “only psychiatrist for 1.3 million of the world’s most traumatized people. His roving practice along this island nation’s eastern shore stretches over 150 miles, all of it devastated by last week’s tsunami.”
Huh? These people don’t need to be asked about their mothers, they need somebody to patch up their bodies! Well, that’s what he thinks too:
“To talk about psychological needs when you’ve got thousands of people using one toilet in a refugee camp — it’s absurd,” says Ganesan, who goes by one name as is common here, talking above the din in the office where he is coordinating medical supplies for refugees. “It’s not what a doctor should do.” In these traumatic days, Ganesan has tossed dozens of corpses into the back of his pickup, distributed medicine to children, coordinated efforts of hundreds of foreign aid workers from dozens of countries, buried a friend and, just for a moment yesterday, had a quiet session with a violently psychotic young man crippled by delusions and drug addiction.
Ganesan spends much of his time these days coordinating relief efforts.
Ganesan’s job, for which he volunteered and is not paid, is to connect this onslaught of international aid — all of it earnest and well meaning and completely ignorant of the situation on the ground — with specific camps or individuals.
What I like about this guy is that he’s a hard nosed pragmatist, not a touchy-feely. For example, he’s trying to defer some aid so that it arrives when it is most needed:
There are dozens of offers from dozens of countries for teams of grief counselors, but Ganesan tries to talk them out of it. The time for such therapy, he says, is weeks or months into the future, not during the immediate crisis.
I also like his philosophy:
There are moments when life reveals itself, insight reached through periods of great suffering and hardship. In the spiritual sense, the first teaching of Buddhism, the principal religion of this nation, is that life is suffering and that this cannot be avoided. This is the lesson that Ganesan has come to understand in his time on this leeward shore: To suffer is to survive. To bear it with grace and courage is to live.
This guy is really hard core. He left his comfortable life in the UK, took a pay cut of around 95% (from $75K/year to $3,600/yr), and moved back to Sri Lanka around 5 years ago. He’s the only psychiatrist for one million people, his wife is the only pediatrician for 500,000. And this is not an easy area to work in:
Even before the tidal wave, when his clients were one of the world’s most suicide-prone populations, his practice was filled with paranoid schizophrenics, manic-depressives, rape victims and thousands of torture victims from the civil war (one subset of patients: people with pencils jammed in both ears simultaneously).
If patients did not know to come to him, he went to them. He worked with children’s agencies, with groups that campaigned against violence toward women. He saw all the attempted suicide patients and the war torture victims that he could. He set up 16 clinics in cities along the coast and spent a third of each month on the road. The work was and is overwhelming. There were and are days when he has six or seven attempted suicides — swallowing poison being the favored local method — a national problem whose basic causes still escape him. There have been years when Sri Lanka has been the world leader in suicides per capita, a fact that makes him shake his head. There are also at least 20,000 torture victims in the region, says Ananda Galapatti, a friend of Ganesan and local counselor who has published in international journals about psychological relief work. That number does not include traumatized children and the shell-shocked and those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. “If you wanted to undertake a traditional psychiatric practice of seeing patients one on one for an hour here — well, you’d need thousands of doctors,” Galapatti says. So Ganesan set up local volunteers to conduct talk sessions or simply to play games with children, or he enlisted family members to help with mentally disturbed adults.
This guy is amazing. In his own way, I consider him as hard core as Neil Prakash, but where Lt. Prakash has the advantage of being part of a large organization, Ganesan is working all on his own. And if you don’t believe that Ganesan’s doing serious work, read the article, he’s helping some seriously deranged individuals.
Cite: In Sri Lanka, a New Wave Of Pain, WaPo