So I’m on the shuttle and the guy is just talking on and on and on. We’re not really having a conversation; he’s talking at me. Initially, I tried to interject with fully-formed sentences, but my efforts failed. So now, I am nodding and uttering the occasional, “Ah.” “Oh.” “I see.” “Uh huh.” “Yeah.”
The psychiatrist is talking about his research. He’s passionate about it; he’s waving his hands around and Seriousness masks his face as he pontificates about the finer points in his area of interest. He’s expounding on theories of personality and different manifestations of the same, hypothesized condition. He’s expressing his fascination with the same story he hears week after week, month after month, from different patients.
“Uh huh.”
He’s offering examples—there was this young woman, you see—and I saw this young, college-aged kid—and the widowed wife—
“Yeah.”
“There just something about the personality structure—and not that I think the personality is disordered, I don’t think that at all—there’s just something about these personalities that leads them to manifest their symptoms in this way, you know? Like I saw this young woman—she had ‘Professional Woman Syndrome’—″
I blink at him. Professional Woman Syndrome? What?
“—where highly accomplished women are very stoic and blame themselves when things don’t go right and, you know, they’re very smart, but they end up manifesting their emotions in these unhealthy ways so they end up in the hospital with these lengthy medical work-ups—”
I bite my tongue. Do you not realize who you’re talking to…? a professional woman? your colleague? hello?
“—and it’s not a disease, it’s just the way professional women cope with stress.” His prattling continues.
“Uh huh,” I dryly reply. I decide he’s not worth the effort—I shan’t engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.
17 Aug 2007 |
The first thing I was taught by my preceptor as a pharmacy graduate was “never argue with an idiot”. That advice has held me in good stead.
Comment by yay | 17 Aug 2007 @ 10:14pm
i had to google this PWS to verify that there isn’t really a syndrome out there like this. to my relief, besides this entry (and you rank first, congrats), there is only one other page that uses the term.
Comment by fathima | 17 Aug 2007 @ 10:45pm
We adopted 3 children from Korea, and one of the interesting things is what people will say to your face about it. The mild comments are along the lines of questioning your sanity, then there are increasing rude and crude ones that we were happy our children didn’t understand.
After a time we just developed a collection of facial-expression-reactions without words that handled the situation from a personal perspective to keep from screaming, and we learned to not pay attention to the reaction as we entered a restaurant with our entourage.
Comment by Greg P | 18 Aug 2007 @ 11:46am
As one professional woman to another… yup, he was definitely unarmed.
Comment by Barb | 20 Aug 2007 @ 4:02am
Ummmm….and people think sexism is not alive and well. After hearing that, if you didn’t think that doctors were more likely to think that womens’ problems are “all in their head,” I’m sure you do now.
This is a particularly ingenious twist, too, since the presumably physical complaints are, “all in their head” and yet “not a disease, just the way they deal with stress.” Well, that’s handy, we can get back to ignoring them and getting back to the REAL patients with REAL problems now…you know, men!
The funny thing is that this person probably isn’t “unarmed.” He’s pretty intelligent, but often intelligent people just use those extra IQ points to come up with more ingenious ways to justify and prop up their cherished and unacknowledged prejudices.
Comment by Lisa Williams | 22 Aug 2007 @ 8:55pm