Through My Prism: Journey of a Clinical Psychiatrist

By Dr. Gul

Mental health disorders are very serious medical conditions which can lead to great harm for individuals, families, and whole communities if ignored or left untreated. After 35+ years of experience in private practice as a clinician in the field of psychiatry, Dr. Gul shares with readers many of her cases where psychiatric interve

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Nov 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822901452

Dr. Gul

Dr. Gul is a renowned clinical psychiatrist trained in Boston. With a private practice since 1982, she has authored notable works including "Through my Prism" and "Who is a Woman". In her writing, she blends her medical expertise with insightful narratives. Residing in Southern California with her husband, an internist/Pulmonologist, she's a proud mother and grandmother. I am a Sikh is her tribute to Sikhism's profound history.

Book preview

Chapter 1

I am the proud daughter of two loving parents who taught me the value of education and hard work and the need to be of service to my fellow human beings. I am also the wife of a doctor, the proud mother of two successful sons, and the grandmother of four young grandchildren. I started my formal training as a clinical psychiatrist in 1979 at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. I graduated from the prestigious Lady Hardinge Medical College in New Delhi, India, and after getting married, I came to the USA in 1976 with my husband.

My education at Lady Hardinge Medical College has a rather interesting background story. During the time my mother was pregnant with me, my father, a young captain in the Indian army, was stationed in New Delhi. As my mother later told me, one evening as she and my father went driving past the campus of this medical school, my father said, If we have a daughter, she will attend this medical school and go on to become a doctor. You see, as the name suggests, Lady Hardinge is a girls-only medical school. Nineteen years later, after I graduated from high school and completed the one year of required premedical school college classes, my father’s dream for me was fulfilled. I gained admission to Lady Hardinge Medical College and went on to graduate and became a doctor.

My husband and I came to the USA in June of 1976. My husband got a position as a resident in general surgery in a hospital in Buffalo, New York, which is where we started our life as a young married couple. At the time, I was pregnant with my first son, Bibi, and he was born in Buffalo during the blizzard of 1976. That was our introduction to the cold, snowy winters of the East Coast.

We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Buffalo, in a multistory apartment building. When I look back at 1976, I am filled with a whole lot of emotions: awe and joy and, most of all, gratitude. Back then, physicians-in-training, known as residents, typically worked extremely long hours day after day, week after week. We were paid a pretty meager salary—$19,000 per year—during the three years of my residency in psychiatry. In 1976, as a general surgery resident, my husband also worked long hours and earned a meager salary. Off and on, he would moonlight at a smaller community hospital for five dollars per hour. The hospital needed doctors to cover the night shift in the emergency room, and we needed the money. Because money was so tight, I tried my best to keep expenses down. I cooked meals at home and packed them for my husband to take to work so he would not have to spend money in the hospital cafeteria. I felt sorry for my husband because I knew I was an awful cook. Quite foolishly, I also tried to save money by skipping my own meals. Though I was a doctor who had also done rotations on OB/GYN wards and knew very well the importance of a healthy, balanced diet for a pregnant woman, I failed to use this knowledge in my own pregnancy. My son Bibi was born prematurely with an extremely low birth weight. He had to spend two months in the NICU to get to a body weight where he could then be safely discharged from the hospital.

Following our time in Buffalo, we lived for two years in Rochester, New York, where I gave birth to my second son, Munna. I cleared my exams with very good scores, and with my medical license in hand, I was ready to embark on my training as a psychiatrist.

Chapter 2

I started my residency in psychiatry in 1979 at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a multispecialty training facility situated in Brighton, a section of Boston. Fortunately, my husband had been accepted into a two-year pulmonary medicine fellowship in the same hospital. St. Elizabeth had a fifty-six-bed locked psychiatric facility that occupied three floors on one side of the general hospital, which housed all the other disciplines of medicine. We needed keys to enter each separate floor of the three-story unit, and the third floor had rooms that were also individually locked. This floor had our most aggressive and psychotic patients, as well as our suicidal patients. These patients needed extra supervision and had to be separated from all other patients for the safety of others as well as their own protection.

Each floor had its own nursing station, staffed by male and female nurses and their aides. Even though I started my residency in July of 1979 and graduated at the end of June in 1982, I can still visualize the whole facility vividly and clearly remember so many aspects of the three years I spent there. I think that is perhaps because, as a resident, a doctor spends more time in the hospital than anywhere else, including their home.

We would start each day at 8:00 a.m. with a conference of our peers and a senior staff psychiatrist. The format of the meeting was for the resident who had been on call the previous day to present the case history of every patient who had been admitted to the unit during the last twenty-four hours and discuss their diagnoses and treatment plan. The peers would ask questions and give their input, and finally, the senior psychiatrist would sign off on the case.

As residents, we were on call every fourth day, which meant we would work twenty-four hours straight, covering the patients on the three floors of the unit, providing consultations to the other services like medical, surgical, and OB/GYN at the general hospital, and being available to evaluate and treat patients in the emergency room. We had a very busy ER where