By Karla Cloete
Edited by Randy Tsubane
Interns are a famously overworked crowd. This is especially true for psychology interns in studying to become psychologists.
Zahrah Essop is a 24-year-old psychology intern, working in the Sterkfontein psychiatric hospital. On a typical day, she starts by getting up early and heading to the hospital. Here she sees patients for both individual and group sessions, runs psychoeducation groups, and visits local community clinics and not to mention filling out her own body weight’s worth of administrative forms.
During her week she attends lectures, does academic work, meets with her supervisors, and attends group training. In addition to this, she is also an activist, a traveler and reader- when she has time that is.
It can get quite overwhelming for Zahrah. She initially chose this career after her father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Zahrah watched him struggle not only physically, but mentally and emotionally as well. She then began to consider the importance of mental wellbeing and how often it gets overlooked.
Zahrah has also had her own struggles with mental health as she suffers from severe anxiety and co-morbid depression. Her own journey and realizing how often mental health challenges go unrecognized in our communities also motivated her to go into this field.
I am just a very curious person and there's something about looking at people and understanding their nature and how it all fits together. It's beautiful. It's like a puzzle and everything just sort of fits together and trying to understand that and see how you can help people, that is fascinating. So it's that curiosity that really drives me.
She studied at both Wits and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UZKN). Initially, she was going to study law and only had psychology as a part of a general Bachelor of Arts degree. Once she decided she wanted to pursue this career, it was a long road: an honors degree, a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and now an internship.
Zahrah recognizes the difficulties her patients undergo. She says for them, the challenging part is recognizing that they are dealing – or struggling – with a mental illness. Then comes the long process of trying to find treatment – many patients don’t have access to care, are signed up onto long waiting lists to see a healthcare professional or may even be assigned to a mental health practitioner who doesn’t speak their language before they can begin the process of undergoing therapy. Many of these challenges are not only personal and environmental but are also caused by much larger systemic issues.
If we conceptualize the country as a patient, the psyche of our country seems frustrated and at a standstill and I wanted to drive some momentum into that.
The issues in South Africa’s mental health system are multifaceted: a prevailing stigma about mental illness, structural barriers, poverty, and not to mention the country’s deeply rooted history of trauma.
One thing Zahrah wishes people could understand is how they unwittingly contribute to others’ progress, but also to their decline. In speaking to others we can often make careless remarks that invalidate and shame them without knowing that’s what we are doing.
I've got a lot of patients who come in and say things like:
‘I'm so sorry. I must be annoying you. I'm not really that interesting.’
...and that's because people in their lives have taught them things like that like remarks such as, “you know it's not that deep” when they feel something or ‘ag that’s such a boring thing to care about.
That is such an unfair thing to put on this person, to reduce what they are into nothing.
So when you say things like ‘but just be positive’, ‘just breathe’, ‘why are you are so negative all the time’, you're putting the burden of blame for the person's mental illness on them and it's not a helpful thing to do.
Zahrah says that it’s better to be a listening ear: ask them about their feelings and encourage them to share their experience if they are comfortable, rather than trying to help them see the bright side or discouraging them from feeling difficult emotions. It can be very uncomfortable to sit with or talk about these negative feelings and experiences. Our instinct is usually to avoid, dismiss and minimize them, but that is rarely ever helpful.
It may not come naturally, but with practice and Zahrah has grown from experience into becoming an attentive, patient and understanding listener. Growth in this occupation is essential, especially for fledgling psychology students trying to make their way into such a competitive field. Zahrah advises these students to really integrate their own motives for pursuing this career.
You are the vehicle or the vessel for change. You are the tool in this profession. You are your profession. It pervades every aspect of your life. This includes growing and learning about yourself in ways that are often painful, and would prefer not to know. You learn things that you really did not want to know, and confront the truth about yourself. You uncover all of this, and are forced to confront things you thought were true about yourself and realize they're not true.
So It's a constant learning curve and growing. It's not a very nice journey. It’s not smooth, or easy either. It's just such a difficult process that if your only reason for doing it is that you want to help people, I think you will end up burning out. There has to be something else. Something also drives you personally as to why you want to do it. Helping people is great, sure, but there has to be something more that keeps you in the profession.
Karla Cloete is a 22-year-old student, from Gauteng, currently doing her honours in Creative Writing at North-West University. She did both her undergraduate and honours degree in psychology. She is an avid reader and plant collector. She is also passionate about mental health, women’s rights and working with young people and children. Karla also dabbles in art and loves participating in debate in her free time. She also has a background in theatre and acting. Her ultimate goal is to become a psychologist and to work in children’s literature.
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