Anxiety—College Boy Problems

Before I met with Peter, the 20-year old college boy with anxiety, I asked his parents if there was anything they were concerned about. He said, “Well, it would be great if he were a little more outgoing.” I hadn’t seen the boy in a couple of years and didn’t really know him well since he didn’t go to the doctor much. Was he shy?

An hour or so later, with them waiting patiently outside the exam room, I knew he had a full-blown anxiety disorder. Many people have some anxiety in certain situations, like public speaking. Some people have more focused anxiety about specific things, like spiders or heights. Some have anxiety about things that they themselves know intellectually to be fairly harmless to most other people, such as a fear of balloons. Some fears are so unusual that the person is able to talk about them freely, and knows that they are not an issue for everyone else they have ever met, but the fear is quite real to them. Perhaps a great thing about the internet is that it can give this last group of people the ability to connect with the 1 or 2 or 5 other people who share their unusual problem. By example, there is a community, of sorts, for those with a fear of buttons.

He lived at home with his parents. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. His parents were nice people and nice to him. And they never threatened to kick him out. They probably never would. That’s a nice thing, too.

But he never indicated that there might be advantages to living away from his parents. More than that, he couldn’t fathom why anybody his age would want to move away from home. It wasn’t like he was so emotionally tied to his parents. I had spoken with them, though not about him. They went on vacation, sometimes camping. They went out to the movies sometimes. Most of the time, I learned from Peter, they went with their other two children but not with him. He never wanted to go. I could picture a dysfunctional relationship in which he didn’t want them to leave, but he never objected. He was most comfortable just staying at home. Alone.

He wasn’t psychotic about his anxiety. He didn’t believe (or say he believed) that if he rode the bus then the world would end by a volcano emerging under his suburban town just as a meteor hit the earth causing an rip in the space-time continuum which would provide an attack opportunity for the Monsters from the Id.

Still, I had a bad feeling about where this was heading. Unlike the College Girl I had seen just a day before, he was not tortured by his anxiety. He knew that others weren’t as concerned as he was about many things, but the way he thought was obvious. Every unusual fear was completely reasonable, and he was almost bemused about the mad foolishness he witnessed around him. To him, our riding in vehicles of all kinds appeared like those who walk tightropes over great gorges. He saw that people did it, that they could do it regularly, but you’d have to be positively nuts actually to try it.

This is also how he saw the pursuit of human relationships. OK, I’m also talking about more basic drives here, too. But this was a big difference with the College Girl. She didn’t have a boyfriend and wanted one. She absolutely did understand why her peers were in or wanted to be in a relationship. She also understood what was keeping her from achieving this goal. She perceived her anxiety as a handicap that she hated, a roadblock she was desperate to overcome and was so far unsuccessful at doing so.

Was he really forthcoming with me? Like every patient, he was entitled to his privacy and owed me no explanation. Some doctors, I know, think that if a patient isn’t open about something, or if a patient fabricates something, then they can’t or shouldn’t help them. It’s certainly an impediment to treatment when a person doesn’t seem to respond to medication that they say they are taking but aren’t. But mostly if patients want me to give them my best advice and they want advice based on some hypothetical situation, that’s what I and they will be stuck with.

Is this denial? Once I saw a child who had been in and out of emergency rooms at least 4 or 5 times over several months. Every time the family went in with him, he had trouble breathing. He was given breathing treatments and medication and sent home to follow up with his primary care physician. They didn’t give him the medication, didn’t make the follow up appointments. They needed a form filled out for school, and the doctor told them that the child had asthma and would benefit from better control of his symptoms. They changed doctors, and came to the practice where I used to work. I told them their child had asthma and would benefit from better control of his symptoms. He went to the ER again, then they asked for their records to be transferred to another practice.

Is it my job to puncture his denial, if it is? Is it my role to judge his life decisions as somehow inadequate, as incompatible with happiness? Is my definition of happiness and success as an adult a reasonable goal? There are societal norms, of course, and he was aware of these. Marriage, family, work, kids, and so on. Certainly here in one of the epicenters of alternative lifestyles, there aren’t a lot of choices that wouldn’t be tolerated. Besides, I lived in Utah for 3 years. In ways that I appreciate more from a distance—topographical, chronological, and metaphorical—some of those people were very much willing to do a lot to live outside of the mainstream. Whether in shallow swamps of consanguine genes or in isolated heavily-armed bunkers waiting for the race-war end-of-times, they were going to do it their way.

Let me be explicit about some of the ethical issues associated with this case.

1. If the patient doesn’t think it’s a problem, is it a problem? Before there were Wall Street executives who didn’t take any responsibility in their congressional testimony, there was a panel of Tobacco CEOs who swore under oath that they didn’t believe that smoking caused health problems. That seemed sleazy and dishonest. But if a patient says that they are just fine with what they are doing, does the doctor have an obligation to do more than educate, inform, and offer help?  This is called autonomy.

2. Is Peter hurting anyone else by his inattention to his anxiety disorder? Sure, his parents had dreams for him that might be difficult to achieve. But who among us has parents who have always thought that we would be exactly who we are now? I am, to be blunt, worried that what appears typical enough at the moment—a college kid living at home while attending a decent and popular local institution—could become more cumbersome as the years go by. Do his parents deserve a life of their own, without their kids? Do their kids owe them the freedom gained by moving the heck out of the house at some point? And the parents aren’t my patient, so should I care what they need?

3. I want to repeat that last part. The parents aren’t my patient. This is an easy issue for some of the patients I see. I have a patient who’s nearly 30 now, severely developmentally delayed. I have autistic kids who are technically autistic adults. It’s an easy issue for them because they have legal guardians and decision-makers. Not Peter—he’s going to college. But in some ways, obviously from these essays, I think of him as having a handicap. It’s not politically-correct, I know, to use that term at all. But there’s something about him, that is with him in every setting, that often interferes with his achievement of some of his own goals. It interferes, in my professional opinion, with his ability to meet some criteria of independent—if not happy, perhaps—adulthood. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 says a covered disability is a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity. What should I tell his parents? That their kid is sick and needs to have medication spiked into his orange juice? I want to tell them everything. They are his best advocates, they know something isn’t right. He gets along well with them. Shouldn’t they be there to encourage him to seek the help I think he needs? A lot of parents read this, and would probably agree. But what about when you were 20—would you have wanted your doctor calling your parents?  This is another part of what autonomy is all about.