Appreciating Our Town, Our Work, and Our Lives

PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

My wife and I had an unexpected bookend experience to the week that started with Halloween, that annual day devoted to both the tricks and treats in life. Following with columns on that, welcoming back ancestors on the Day of the Dead, and the promise of newly elected politicians, we once again saw a version of the 1938 play by Thornton Wilder, “Our Town,” this time put on by the Limelight Theatre in our country’s oldest town, St. Augustine. The year 1938 came both in the development of modern Freudian psychiatry and the threat of the Nazis in Germany, major treats and tricks, respectively.

“Our Town,” in all its deceptive simplicity depicting life in a small town in New Hampshire from over a hundred years ago, can even seem sappy if viewers were expecting something dramatic and exciting. Sometimes we similarly have that experience with patients in psychotherapy who focus on the surface of their lives while avoiding their painful depths. Our expertise can lie in knowing the right time and right way to go deeper.

In “Our Town,” that shift happens suddenly in Act 3, a connection to the ancestors of Day of the Dead. There are citizens sitting stone-faced in a cemetery, awaiting the arrival of a young mother who had just died in childbirth. Gradually, they reveal their emotional separation from the living. The new arrival, Emily, is allowed to go back and see a typical day in her childhood. She comes to realize how much of great importance she took for granted, just as most of us do. Many of our gifts in life can be in the details, if only we see and appreciate them. The devil may not be in the details, but instead the holy.

It is even more challenging to appreciate these wonders of our everyday lives when the world is so infused with conflict and rapid change, and we in psychiatry are in the throes of burnout and moral injuries. Yet, those challenges may be the cost, hopefully temporary, of a life worth caring about.

In bringing back ancestors, both the Day of the Dead and “Our Town” connect with psychiatry. Often, one of the primary psychological threads of our clinical work is processing the influence of ancestors in our lives. Usually, that focuses on the processing of the problematic past.

“Our Town” depicts how a young baseball rising star reacts positively to the interpretation of his would-be partner’s criticism of his rising narcissism by changing his ways for the better, so that the few years before her death are infused with their blossoming relationship. The suddenness of her death reminds us not to miss appreciating what we take for granted along the way—in our case, the opportunities to help others in psychological pain.

The play is moved along by the narration of the stage manager. In a way, we have that opportunity to play such a role in our clinical cases and case reports. Let us make the best of these everyday work opportunities, supplemented by what must be valued in our own personal lives.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.