Reporting From Canada, #8: Towards Forgiveness and Redemption

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

I have reported on 2 plays we have seen at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Canada: “As You Like It” and “Macbeth.” Both have to do with misguided leadership based on unconstrained ambition and power. Though such leaders get their comeuppance, Shakespeare does not seem to leave us with any clear roadways toward prevention and redemption.

One road that does often work in life is that of forgiveness, both the process and in the Canadian play of the same title. “Forgiveness” the play is an adaptation of a book titled Forgiveness: A Gift From My Grandparents by Mark Sakamoto, based on a real life story of 2 families over the course of almost a century.

With some similarity to what happened in the United States, one family depicted was an established Canadian family of Japanese descent who were put into detention camps during World War II as some sort of fear or punishment for their association to the enemy country of Japan. The other family centered around a Canadian soldier of European ancestry who became a tortured prisoner of war of the Japanese and then hated the Japanese. The positive resolution and overcoming of mistrust comes when the young adults of both families fall in love and the families slowly come to accept that. Such relationships that positively cross differences can help dissipate chronic conflict.

Much research indicates that forgiveness is generally good for one’s mental and physical health. It can also be good for the recipient if conveyed to them, and for forgiving oneself. Not unusually, we must forgive ourselves for common and expected falling short at times in our clinical work. Those kinds of everyday mistakes do not mean malpractice, but we should learn from them. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting or ignoring justice.

In psychiatric clinical practice, forgiveness often emerges as a challenge during the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. Whether to forgive a perpetrator of trauma is often an anguishing decision.

Besides and behind forgiveness, redemption is an option, as depicted in the play “A Winter’s Tale,” where the King kills his wife out of undue jealousy. Redemption includes possible ways of making up for the trauma. It is also worth watching cautiously for aspects of forgiveness that can be fabricated in order to obtain some other social advantage.

Although forgiveness and redemption can be viewed as positive psychiatry processes, there seem to be social limits to their use. Although it may be hard to imagine forgiveness and redemption developing between Ukraine and Russia, or Iran and Israel, or maybe even our hardcore Republicans and Democrats, that did occur between Germany and Israel, where clearly the genocide of Jews was proclaimed and halfway through by the Nazis. Germany and Israel have developed a positive relationship which could hardly have been imagined. It provides a model and loadstar for us all. That the play “Forgiveness” became the surprise hit of the Stratford summer season just amplifies the human hopefulness and potential to do better.

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.