JIV/JIVE/FIVE

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My Father the Hero

While packing up my family home this past weekend, I came across this gem of an article: a perspective of how great a doctor (and man) my dad was and a call for mental health awareness. WINS all around!

‘Physician works hard to assist patients’

I was recently hospitalized for my manic depressive illness at Jennie Edmundson Hospital psych. Dr. John Fernandez is my physician. I would like to thank this very dedicated and caring doctor, who many times goes way beyond the call of duty for his patients. Dr. Fernandez is the medical director at JEMH psychiatry department. He also sees patients at Red Oak and Harlan and is a medical adviser at Prairie Rose Mental Health plus is a family man.

Working usually six, sometimes seven days a week, he makes each patient feel like a person and not just a psych patient. From small children to teenagers to the elderly, I as a nurse and a patient, have seen how much Dr. Fernandez is loved and trusted. He has a wonderful sense of humor and makes me feel as though my mental illness is just one of the cards I happen to have been dealt in life so I just deal with it and go on. I never know when my illness will cycle around again, but I know I can always count on Dr. Fernandez to help me cope and get me through it.

Mental illness is a scary thing to the patient and to family and friends. I have decided to dedicate my life to helping people to understand mental illness. I am happily married with a son and hold down a full-time high-stress job and try to contribute as much as I can to community service, but yes, I have a biological, possibly genetic, illness (bipolar disorder) and doctors like Dr. John Fernandez help me the same as a cardiologist helps someone with a heart condition. It’s time for people to accept us, the mentally ill, and it’s time for insurance companies to treat us like anyone else with an illness and pay the same rates, and it’s time for us, the mentally ill, to step out of the closet and stop being ashamed of an illness we just happen to be dealt in life.

Thank you, Dr. Fernandez, and my husband and son, thank you for getting me through some really tough times and helping make the rest of my life very happy and relatively normal.

Chris Carlson,

Shelby, Iowa

Daily Nonpareil

Monday, April 14, 1997