This article was originally published by MediaZona. We translate it with permission here.
Since the start of quarantine in April, a constant stream of phone calls has been hitting the Clear Morning hotline, which provides psychological assistance to cancer patients in Russia. People have complained about chemotherapy appointments being postponed or cancelled and the tactless behaviour by some oncologists, director Olga Goldman tells me.
“They’ve sent patients out of the room, yelled at them or refused to speak to them,” Goldman says. “Patients have also asked doctors a question and got the answer: ‘Why did you come to see me? You’ll be dead soon.’ Then we realised that medical staff also needed help and started taking calls from doctors from all areas of treatment. Doctors need to be healthy and ready, otherwise they won’t be able to help anyone.”
Most of the 82 medics who have contacted psychologists at the “Doctors Need Care” initiative complain of emotional burnout, apathy, fatigue and depression, says founder Lyudmila Golubkova.
Many of them need emergency help: “We help them cope with their anxiety and problems relating to their colleagues and families, as well as psychosomatic issues like sleeplessness and loss of appetite. We’re often asked to teach self-help courses, and we’re planning to record some short audio guides on scientifically proven calming techniques, so that doctors can return to a normal state of mind by themselves.”
People often phone in a state of panic “or when someone is already sitting and thinking about taking their own life”, Olga Goldman from the Clear Morning hotline says.
“In normal circumstances, doctors – therapists, ophthalmologists and neurologists – don’t often have to deal with patients dying very often,” Goldman says. “But now they have had to enter the “Red Zone’, and some of them have even reassigned – from gynaecologists to experts in resuscitation, to put it bluntly. At the same time, any patient’s death is a recognition of the doctor’s own inadequacy: their main task is, after all, to heal. They have feelings of guilt, hopelessness, unfairness. Everyone is working at their limit, they’re run off their feet – and people are still dying. This is an enormous factor in professional and psychological burn-out.”
Ill humour, psychosis and anxiety
In early May Antonina Sedova, a nurse from St Petersburg, wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin about the lack of resources for personal protective equipment in the Djanelidze medical emergency research institute, where two nurses had already died of confirmed coronavirus. On the following day, the Institute’s director called Sedova into his office.
“He told me that I had gone against the collective,” Sedova recalls. “What do you mean, ‘against the collective’? I was doing it for the collective. I was sorry for my colleagues: they were going on sick leave one after another. It’s my opinion that if the director hired us, he should protect us. On the next day I had a positive Covid-19 test, and on the day after that I was taken to hospital.”
The nurse spent over a month in hospital, and sent goodbye messages to her family several times: “I was so anxious, I would awake in the night, my heart beating as though I had done a cross-country run. I buried my husband two years ago and I have a six-year-old daughter and elderly parents. And I realised that this could be the end. I was afraid I wouldn’t pull through.”
Print
Alla Konstantinova | Radio Free (2020-07-29T00:00:00+00:00) How Russia’s doctors are dealing with the psychological strain of COVID-19. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/29/how-russias-doctors-are-dealing-with-the-psychological-strain-of-covid-19/
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