Summer

Summer is certainly here.  The Big 4th of July Weekend has passed and everyone is in full summer mode.  Some are sitting on stoops, going to bar-b-ques, headed to the beach or the lake.  The city is full of events to keep the residents home to spend their money locally, or to entertain the tourists.  All the cities, large and small on the New England coast, from Newport, RI, to Bar Harbor ME are full and festive.  The visitors from Topeka probably think it's like that all year long.

For me, still working, still doing at least three full days a week, the divide between work and play is huge.  I feel so fortunate that my family, all three generations now, is happy, healthy, enthusiastic and even prosperous.  It becomes even more difficult to turn the pages of the Sunday paper and read about what goes on in Egypt, Mali, Syria, China, Spain, and even Florida and Texas.  It is even more painful to see what happens with our very own government, grinding to a halt in Washington, D.C, helping no one, solving nothing.

That is also what upsets me in my practice.  So many of the patients i have to deal with have problems that are due as much to politics as they are emotions, neurological, genetic or family dynamics.  I see a 58 year-old man who knows he will never be able to get a job that pays close to what he has had before. His unemployment support has ended.  His wife is exhausted from dealing with his feelings of hopelessness.

I see a 25 year-old woman who is working as a waitress and wants to go back to nursing school but she already has $32K in student loans.  Her father is dead and her mother makes $14 an hour.  She would have to take all of her courses, do her clinical rotations, and also be working full-time to support herself,. A friend of hers from high school, whose grades were never as good as hers, has father who is buying her a condo near school and paying all of her expenses.

I have about a dozen more examples for this: cases in which $25K would be much more help than two years of therapy.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach him to fish and he will starve to death if there are no fish to catch.