In a special series, reporter Marelle Reid chats with the people who make RCH run.
Anson Koo is a psychiatrist who has been the head of the psychiatry department at RCH for the past three years.
The Record caught up with Koo recently to find out what it's like to be a psychiatrist at the hospital.
Question: Can you describe your role?
Answer: I'm responsible for overseeing mental health programs both at the hospital and in our community - New West and the Tri-Cities. In the hospital, I oversee a 32-bed in-patient unit. So that's where people come in when they need psychiatric admission. These are people who are really unwell and need around-the-clock care. We also have a psychiatric emergency department and we see over 2,500 patients a year there.
Q: What's the most interesting thing about your job?
A: The privilege that I have to be able to work with patients who share some of the most difficult experiences and periods of their lives. I think it's fair to say that for many people when they're new to a psychiatry ward, it's one of the darkest moments of their lives.
Q: Something you wish you could change about your job?
A: I think the biggest challenge is that our program facilities are outdated and don't reflect the need of our exploding population. So it's really inadequate resources that we struggle with. But what I find is that the ministry of health is working with us to plan a new building and plan services that really meet the need of a population that has really doubled since we opened our department in the mid-'80s.
Q: Is there one myth you'd like to dispel about your job?
A: Some people still have this idea that we are sort of mind readers or we're analyzing and that's the way we understand problems, and it's really not true at all. We're a scientific discipline and field of medicine. We use the results of research to guide our practices, and we really look at people holistically, and from the perspective of individual lives, families, we work with entire family units to promote recovery. . It's not all about medication, and we certainly don't read minds.
Q: What's the most common reason for patients to be admitted for psychiatric care?
A: It's extremely diverse, but I would say the big reasons are because of psychosis - people who aren't able to perceive reality, so are hallucinating or having very powerful delusions - and the other is people who are in the midst of some life crisis and become profoundly depressed and, for instance, have tried to kill themselves or are suicidal and wish to kill themselves.
Q: Are there any mental illnesses for which there are no cures?
A: Mental illness, . conditions like diabetes and hypertension, you know, there are no cures for most conditions in medicine. What we do is provide treatments that can help people to recover and try to reduce the likelihood of a recurrence of an episode and improve people's quality of life through education, active treatment and (getting) people more functional.
Q: What did you want to be when you were a kid?
A: I think I wanted to be someone who navigated a boat, like a sailor or something so that I could go and see the different parts of the world.
Q: So how did you become a psychiatrist?
A: It was an area that intrigued me in medicine as a whole. I love working with people. I love not just working with people as individuals, but having a broader impact on the society I live in that has given me so much.
Q: Do you wear scrubs?
A: No, we don't. We try to dress in a way that patients can kind of relate to us in terms of the mental space that they're in. I dress generally in a jacket and not too formal, but not too casual.
