Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.

AMEN Australia 2018: Healing, Surviving, Thriving

<p>Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Robert Granger

Andrew Jasper

Allen Lloyd

Panel Discussion

This may seem a bit personal, so feel free to rephrase it how you like, but when was the last time you had your breaking point and how did you cope with it?

The life of a physician, particularly involved in mental health, can be quite intense.

And we just finished the Depression and Anxiety Recovery Program earlier this week in the United States in Atlanta, Georgia before coming out.

And when you're dealing with the type of individuals that are at their breaking point, and particularly when they are resistant, you know, firmly so, it's kind of mystifying in a way.

They're here to, you know, they've come to us for healing, but yet they are so resistant sometimes to the very advice that could get them better.

It's frustrating as a physician sometimes to see how they are their own worst enemy at times.

Although they have feelings of worthlessness, they have a pride that is preventing them from accepting and falling on the rock to be broken.

And so many times it's a spiritual barrier that goes up.

And so, yeah, I felt, I can tell you that, Friday, so it would have been 1 week ago, I felt pretty, pretty frustrated over a particular patient who was making some very poor decisions at this point in the program about a week into it.

And so, yeah, that's a time to fall on our knees and pray for the patient.

The book Prophets and Kings at the last chapter mentions that all of us are going to, at some point in time, feel like there is no hope.

And of course it wasn't for me, for myself feeling there's no hope, but yet when we have the solicitude and the love for souls around us, it's like it is yourself.

And so there's a lot of conflicting feelings that come up over that.

For me, I function from an acronym called HALT.

So my triggers tend to be if I get hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, and there's derivatives of those 4.

I know that I'm on shaky ground sometimes.

So for me, if I start feeling the mind especially getting compromised in capacity, I take heart to where the counsel to the first church in Revelation 2, Remember therefore from where you have fallen, repent and do the first works.

It gives me a sense of look back to where I last saw the light and Ellen White gives us permission that when life is getting really strained, she says do not think.

Rest yourself in the arms of the Almighty.

I look back to where I last saw the light.

Yeah, look, for me, there's been some, yeah, without divulging anything, but there's been some recent issues.

For me 1 of the things that helps to break the trigger for me.

And it just may sound so crazily simplistic.

And I feel that in Western Australia, we do often have this privilege.

But I like to just go lie down outside and look up in blue sky.

And there's something about not having the eyes focus on anything, because it sort of can't out there in the openness, blue sky and prey.

And for me, there's just like this diffusing Switch, there's a power in it, I don't know, it doesn't always work for me, because sometimes I still get up carrying away my burdens, but that for me is just a phenomenal thing.

Nedley, but I think we'd appreciate the whole panel's input as well.

Nedley, just on the whole concept of sanitariums, I can see, you know, the value and that of something like that.

But I suppose if you've got a big city of 3 million people and you have a sanitarium, it's not really going to impact that group of people significantly.

You know, And a lot of our health professionals won't actually be able to work in a place like that depending on their location and where they are.

So is there perhaps, besides the sanitarium model, and I'm not saying it's wrong, is there another model in which we can work together as medical missionaries to support each other?

And I think this is what Amen is all about, but also to fulfill the gospel commission that we have.

Yeah, well, the counsel that we've been given regarding the sanitarium model also had for a city ministry model that actually helped support the sanitarium.

And you need a lot more city clinics, you know, than you do sanitariums actually, where they're working together.

In fact, she encouraged the physicians from the sanitarium to actually go do some of that city work as well and kind of go back and forth, but there would be some physicians that would be dedicated more to that city, busy clinic type of operation.

But what I would, you know, advise that when we're in that big city clinic operation, we are surrounded by those who also have the solicitude for souls and not just be the physician.

I could often learn, you know, and I've had city clinics that are extremely busy where we see, you know, scores of patients a day and multiple providers.

But from the receptionist to the nurse to the lab technician to those dealing with the phone, I always get some additional insight when they're interested in the soul of the patient that I would never get if it was just someone that I hired off the street that had the license or the skill set to be able to take care of the person medically, but didn't really have a spiritual interest.

I guess that's what I'm kind of talking about with the sanitarium model.

Not so much an outpost, but having the entire team be focused on more than just the physical health of the patient, but really the entire health of the patient.

And often the difficulty that patients have in being able to obtain the healing is in regards to the self-control.

We might be able to give them information that's going to help, but if they don't have the self-control, which actually comes from outside of themselves and pointed to God's love, often in very simple ways.

It's not like we have to give them a big Bible study.

Sometimes it's just a sentence or 2 that can make the difference in their own life and being able to overcome in an area where they thought it was impossible before.

That's what I'm talking about in regards to sanitarium work, whether it's in the city or in the country.

If I could just add, Trevor, too, to that, that When I went to the Depression Recovery Residential Program Observed, I was actually just in tandem with my classwork with Darren Morton in the Lifestyle Medicine course.

And as I was going through the course, I was exposed to the change behavior theories and as he sent his grade back to me, my grade for that section, he records his comments on a MP3 and then sends it, emails it to you and I noticed the recording was only halfway through and he was done assessing my thing.

And I said, well, what's he gonna talk about for the rest?

He said, Andrew, did you learn anything in change behavior theory that was challenging to you?

And I had agonized over this whole concept, because as a pastor, many times I find in my profession, we take shortcuts, spiritual shortcuts.

We pray, do a Bible study, expect for the whole transformation to occur.

And I learned that it's gonna take more than just the spiritual component.

That's why the whole person paradigm is so important.

What I saw happen at Weimar is where the whole person is addressed in a short period of time.

And let me just say, people coming out of that with an impact in their life, they're going to be a greater catalyst for future change in other people and I don't think we'll have to worry about the numbers.

What I mean by that is we may only be impacting a small number of people in a sanitarium but those 10 people go out and that becomes 20 and that becomes 40 and rather than adding converts we're going to be exponential in this.

I see those quotes in that sanitarium concept as the finishing of the work, because it intensifies our effectiveness when we work together.

So a big city, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, plant a sanitarium and watch out.

We may have time for 1 more question and then we'll close up.

Bullying is 1 of the causes of the suicide among the professionals.

I want to ask Sue whether you've experienced being bullied before and how do you deal with it?

Well, especially when you're as old as I am.

I can tell you bullying is less frequent now because of all of the, particularly, I mean, I'll just say it, people are more sensitive now, particularly the younger generation, than they were when I grew up.

It was supposed to be that you were to be able to handle all of that stuff coming your way and not crash and not go down for it.

But you know in internal medicine we have something called M&M Conference in the United States.

I don't know if you use that same abbreviation.

And they actually would pass out M&Ms so that you could be sued because there was going to be all sorts of bullying going on in that M&M conference.

For those of you that aren't health professionals, it stands for morbidity and mortality conference.

So they do something where something went wrong in the hospital and you were on that case and everyone that's on that case is brought in and then they start dissecting it and start saying what went wrong and they're basically the prosecuting attorney up there doing that whole sort of arrangement.

And so, yes, bullying took place not only in M&M Conference, but often on a daily basis.

For whatever reason, and it gets into I think the spiritual part of things, I had already been converted.

I was already doing some of the things that I'm talking about here today.

I learned from those conferences, but the way I handled the bullying for whatever reason, even though I never lashed out at anyone doing the bullying, they didn't bully me anymore.

And I think it was the soft answer, turning away wrath, also explaining what was going on.

Sometimes they were accusing me of things that actually weren't true at all, or they were totally misunderstanding some of the other aspects of the case.

But even in the way those mistakes were handled and how I answered back on the whole situation, including the patient, I didn't get repeatedly bullied.

And I praise the Lord for how those individuals that were bullying started to see me in a different way.

And that's Christ in you, the hope of glory.

In reality, those situations become situations where God can move in a greater way.

Those conflict and crisis situations are opportunities for the Lord to shine.

And I don't think we need to, you know, yes, we need to be very careful in not doing that to anybody else in what we're doing, but we need to realize when we're in the world, there is going to be that sort of thing going on.

And I can tell you in a major way, where bullying is going to occur in God's people in a major way has to do with things surrounding LGBTQ and political correctness and those sorts of things because Christians are being singled out and accused of all sorts of things that are not true And we need to be ready for those sorts of events and know how to be able to handle them.

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