“Healthcare professionals have been trained to take care of others, but not to take care of themselves,” says psychologist and director of the Galatea Foundation, Antoni Calvo. The pandemic has brought to light the delicate mental health of doctors, nurses and other health workers. And the entity directed by Calvo, which has the support of the La Caixa Foundation, offers psychological support to those professionals who need it. It is usually the affected people themselves who request it and it is the doctors and nurses who most demand help.
Before the pandemic, the “poor health” of health workers was already worse than that of other professionals, says Calvo. One of the positive aspects of the emergency caused by the coronavirus is that it has “removed” the stigma of mental health. For this reason, in two and a half years of the pandemic, the number of professionals served has doubled.
Montse has been practicing as a family doctor for almost 30 years and about three years ago she “popped”. She says that she ran out of energy, she had anxiety and couldn’t even walk. The last 15 years of relentless work had taken their toll on her, she says. She “acted as a family doctor, a traumatologist, a digestive specialist… and a psychologist.” She decided to ask for help and in Galatea they immediately diagnosed her: “she had a burnout like a cathedral” that affected her physically. He spent a year and a half without leaving home and thanks to psychological work he has returned to work two years ago, although with a reduction and very vigilant in controlling chronic stress, which was what triggered his problem and affected his immune system.
At the Galatea Foundation they have been serving health professionals for a quarter of a century, from doctors and nurses to psychologists and dentists and including pharmacists and veterinarians. The majority of professionals seen ask for help voluntarily, although sometimes the environment encourages them to go to the consultation. A team made up of psychologists and psychotherapists does the screening. If intervention is deemed necessary, five sessions of one hour each are offered. This guideline is usually enough to solve the problem, although this is not always the case. There are cases in which a certain hour is extended or, in the most serious cases, it is referred to the Galatea Clinic.
It is nurses and doctors who need the most psychologist hours. And in the last two years there has been an increase in psychologists asking for psychological help, Galatea explains. Anxiety symptoms, depressive disorders, insomnia and irritability are the problems that are most attended to. All of them linked to work, points out Antoni Calvo. At this time they are especially concerned about primary care and warn that there has been an increase in psychological requests from entire teams.
Montse tries to take care of herself, but she regrets that the health of the health workers is getting worse due to the overload of work with video consultations, the bureaucracy that they have to manage and because of a system that does not respond to the problems of the specialists and whose patients they must continue attending. The situation is critical, she says. So much so that she remembers that in group therapy she met classmates who had made suicide attempts.
In the context of the current crisis, there are also doubly vulnerable professionals, explains the director of the Galatea Foundation. They are dentists, pharmacists or physiotherapists who, on the one hand, must deal with stress and who are also entrepreneurs. “A pharmacist cannot lower the blinds no matter how bad he is mentally,” Calvo exemplifies.
Independently and at the same time together with this situation, Galatea wants to convey a final argument full of empathy: We should not forget that the professionals who take care of our health also have their problems in their personal lives. Montse has learned her lesson: “I try to do the most with the patient, but I take care of myself”
