Returning from a blissful holiday in the sun, it seems it's not only me who's finding it hard to get back to work.
Aged 38, Penelope is single and very much alone. Her family are all abroad and she finds it hard to make close friends. She's been seeing me on and off for a few months now, presenting initially with symptoms of depression and on further occasions to request medical certificates (sick notes).
Whilst her social circumstances are making the situation worse, her major problem centres around her employment, or lack of. Whilst she has had plenty of jobs since she moved to the UK, they have largely involved working in cafes and bars which she finds incredibly stressful and hard to manage. Her love is for the arts and although she works regularly for a film production company, her work is unpaid. Should she be able to find a salaried job in this kind of work, I'm sure she would flourish, but in the current climate that's pretty tough. As it is then, her employment and social problems are making her anxious and depressed and, initially at any rate, it seemed sensible to give her a bit of time off to organise herself and recover.
However, now that she's returning monthly for repeated medical certificates, I'm finding it harder to continue to justify that decision. Her predicament is this; she cannot cope with the kind of job that she is able to get but can't get the sort of job that she'd like. Although she certainly has some symptoms of anxiety and depression, I can't honestly say that she is not fit to work, yet to force her to go back to a bar job would inevitably result in a worsening of her symptoms.
This is really more of a social problem than a medical one and I'm at a loss as to how I can help. Part of her problem lies in her personality and no amount of psychological therapy or counselling is going to change that. Dishing out repeat certificates is surely unhelpful, yet cutting them off and waiting for her to return with a true depression is not appealing either. So where do I go from here?
