Know Thyself

In doing this psychiatry rotation with various extreme personalities and behaviors, I think Socrates had some serious advice there, man.

The other day I took an online version of a Myers-Briggs test
because I couldn't remember the results I got when our college counselor had us take it in high school.

INFJ
Introverted Intuitive Feeling Judging

Here's what it says:

INFJs focus on possibilities, think in terms of values and come easily to decisions. The small number of this type (1 percent) is regrettable, since INFJs have unusually strong drive to contribute to the welfare of others and genuinely enjoy helping their fellow men. This type has great depth of personality; they are themselves complicated, and can understand and deal with complex issues and people.

It is an INFJ who is likely to have visions of human events past, present, or future. If a person
demonstrates an ability to understand psychic phenomena better than most others, this person is apt to be an INFJ. Characteristically, INFJs have strong empathic abilities and can be aware of another’s emotions or intents even before that person is conscious of these. This can take the form of feeling the distress of illnesses of others to an extent, which is difficult for other types. INFJs can intuit good and evil in others, although they seldom can tell how they came to know. Subsequent events tend to bear them out, however.

INFJs are usually good students, achievers who exhibit an unostentatious creativity. They take their work seriously and enjoy academic activity. They can exhibit qualities of overperfectionism and put more into a task than perhaps is justified by the nature of the task. They generally will not be visible leaders, but will quietly exert influence behind the scenes.

INFJs are hard to get to know. They have an unusually rich inner life, but they are reserved and tend not to share their reactions except with those they trust. Because of their vulnerability through a strong facility to interject, INFJs can be hurt rather easily by others, which, perhaps, is at least one reason they tend to be private people. People who have known an INFJ for years may find sides emerging which come as a surprise. Not that INFJs are inconsistent; they are very consist and value integrity. But they have convoluted, complex personalities, which sometimes puzzle even them.

INFJs like to please others and tend to contribute their own best efforts in all situations. They prefer and enjoy agreeing with others, and find conflict disagreeable and destructive. What is known, as ESP is likely found in an INFJ more than in any other types, although other types are capable of such phenomena. INFJs have vivid imaginations exercised both as memory and intuition, and this can amount to genius, resulting at time in an INFJ’s being seen as mystical. This unfettered imagination often will enable this person to compose complex and often aesthetic works of art such as music, mathematical systems, poems, plays, and novels. In a sense, the INFJ is the most poetic of all the types. Just as the ENTJ cannot not lead, so must an INFJ intuit; this capability extends to people, things, and often events,
taking the form of visions, episodes of foreknowledge, premonitions, auditory and visual images of things to come. INFJs can have uncanny communications with certain individuals at a distance.

(Bold is my doing.)
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What do you think?
Want to take it?
Here
Tell me what you get!

And here are some links for descriptions:
Here, here, and here.

We are the Storykeepers

Photo credit: Mayo Fujji, my classmate, on her trip to Montana

I don't think I knew how much of medicine was storytelling.

The majority of time is spent gathering people's stories,
"taking a history".
And people tell you everything.
They will tell you about the aches in their little toe, their great aunt's hernia repair, the time of their last bowel movement, that they're having sex with someone who isn't their wife, all the drugs they've done, and they'll tell you their fears.
Fears about cancer, about heart attacks, about death.

Then we keep these stories.

We can't share them with many people,
only those involved in their care.

But we write them down in H&P's (History & Physical)
or we present the story to our attending physician.
And we keep them inside of us.

When we see that patient again,
this time for high blood pressure,
the history of their divorce and their family history of diabetes
comes tumbling out of our story chest also,
like a pulling a piece of tangled string and realizing that it's connected to everything.

And these stories become a part of us.
We know someone who is a recovering heroin addict.
We grieve the loss of people with stage 4 lung cancer.
We struggle with the knowledge that COPD (emphysema) patients are out there still smoking slowly causing themselves to drown in their own lungs.

Today I started my psychiatry rotation.
I have a feeling that the stories are about to get more harrowing,
and that they may haunt me.
But I feel like these might be the most important stories to hear,
because there are no dressings to be changed,
no stitches needed,
listening might just be one of the best medicines we have.
And there are no side effects for the patient,
only the care giver.

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Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
-Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It