The Winter Olympics in 3 Woman Athletes, and More

PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

The winter Olympics is over and there are so many potential stories of mental health and psychiatric interest. As usual, there is also politics involved in the games.

This year, Russia is prohibited from taking part due to their invasion of Ukraine. The fourth-year anniversary of that invasion occurs tomorrow.

Some of this year’s political conflicts between the United States and Canada played out in both women’s and men’s hockey, the United States dramatically winning both games and gold medals in overtime. Recall the “elbows” up phrase the Canadians took out of hockey to respond to the political aggression of the United States against Canada.

Then, there are always moving opening and closing ceremonies, this time with all the Italian creativity of the arts and fashion, starting with the separated entrance of each country at the beginning of the games and then closing all together.

But the United States strongly values individualism and so, no wonder, especially given the continued ascendancy of women athletes, 3 women especially got my attention. They participated in different sports, seemingly with different motivations and with different results. I hope this emphasis does not seem sexist in any significant way.

Alysa Liu

The youngest first. Alysa Liu had the story line of retiring from figure skating at the age of 16 for 2 and a half years. Upon returning, she reported learning much about herself in the interim, and could now view competition as basically an internal challenge, but as a chance to show her joy and skills instead of a burden. She won a surprise gold model.

Joy is not necessarily a common emotion in health and mental healthcare professionals. Most unlikely might be its presence in coders, given the assumption that it was one of the joyless professions. Yet I was once asked to write a series for the broadcast “Talk Ten Tuesday” on the joy of medical coding and it could be found with gratitude, as Liu did.

Lindsey Vonn

Then there is Lindsey Vonn, about twice as old as Liu, but who had also temporarily retired due to injuries from 2019-2024. By all accounts one of the best skiers in history, she decided to once more try for a downhill gold medal. To add to the challenge, she injured her ACL in her knee only a week before her scheduled competition. During the actual competition, and apparently unrelated to the prior injury, she hooked a pole with her arm and got spun around, resulting in a complete compound fracture of her left tibia, and was airlifted to the hospital. I suppose it was also a trigger to me of my own trauma of sustaining the same injury when I went skiing for the first time in high school. No wonder I was named “Most Accident Prone.” My athletic career dreams were gone.

What commentators and I have been homing in on was when is the right time to retire from sports, other careers, and activities? I have never skied again. Did Vonn go past the right time and, if so, why? Retirement has also been a professional one for me, doing so clinically and administratively when I was 65, a time when it seemed that external business had come to overly control our healing potential. Right after retiring, I felt so much lighter emotionally, somewhat shedding my secondary trauma and burnout. A new focus on writing and speaking developed.

Jessie Diggins

The last was Jessie Diggins, apparently the greatest American cross-country skier in a sport dominated by Nordic athletes. It is a sport that demands so much endurance from the human body. The apparent secret to her success, though, seems to be her pain tolerance. She can push herself to push past the pain, claiming “All it is pain.” No wonder she collapsed after finishing her race at 34 years old, winning a bronze medal.

There can also be psychological pain in psychiatry, the mental and emotional pain clinicians experience from seeing and empathizing with many traumatized patients or seeing too many patients in a day. It can be extensive enough to cause what is called secondary trauma in us.

Concluding Thoughts

Together, all 3 athletes illustrated particular challenges that we also face in psychiatry.

• How do we maintain joy in our work during an epidemic of burning out?
• How can we capably take in the empathy of our patient’s psychiatric pain?
• How do we know the right time, if any or ever, to retire or change our work situation?

The right answers will go a long way toward a satisfying and productive psychiatric career.

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.