The Catholic Spirit: Medical professionals, those with chronic pain gather for talk on suffering

Beginning the Minnesota Catholic Conference (MCC) fall study day Sept. 1, Jason Adkins, MCC’s executive director, said a proper response to pain and suffering — rooted in the dignity of the human person — is especially urgent today.

Titled Righteous Relief: Addressing Pain and Suffering from the Heart of the Church, the event at St. Peter in Mendota featured physicians, nurse practitioners, hospital chaplains and people with chronic pain speaking about modern medicine and the reality of suffering.

“Too often, the response is pharmacological,” Adkins said. “There is a pill for everything. In this context, the human being is conceived as a machine that just needs its parts recalibrated. Never mind the impact of the imbalance such chemical recalibrations in one area have on the whole person. On the other extreme, pain and suffering is understood as a purely psychological or spiritual problem, needing just a change of outlook or praying harder — a type of angelism.”

Among four speakers and two panels, Aaron Kheriaty told those gathered — including Archbishop Bernard Hebda and Auxiliary Bishop Kevin Kenney — that modern medicine is rediscovering the deep connection between the body and the soul. Minnesota Bishops Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Patrick Neary of St. Cloud and Chad Zielinski of New Ulm also participated.

Kheriaty, a psychiatrist and the director of the Program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said, “What affects the one has profound impacts on the other.”

“Religious faith can instill a sense of meaning and purpose that transcends present circumstances or difficulties,” Kheriaty said. “This helps people not only survive periods of intense anguish, but even to find meaning in their suffering.”

“Our Lord didn’t die on the cross so that we could be free of suffering, but so that we could discover that which transcends our suffering, his infinite love,” Kheriaty said. “None of our sufferings are foreign to him. In his passion, Jesus Christ suffered every pain, every agony, every horror, whether physical or psychological or spiritual, that any of us have experienced or could experience on the cross. Jesus went to the lowest depths of human misery in order to find us. Out of those depths, we cry to him, and he goes there. He goes precisely into those depths to find us and to raise us up.”

A sobering reality was revealed on a large projection screen. Graphs, provided by Kheriaty, showed data from studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that showed the suicide rate in the United States is on the rise. In the last 25 years, there has been an increase in deaths by suicide among both men and women in every age group except for seniors.

“Suicide is now the second leading cause of death among young people in the United States, and the 10th leading cause of death overall in this country, which is quite a sobering statistic,” Kheriaty said. “In conjunction with this crisis of deaths by suicide, we’re also witnessing the staggering toll of drug overdose and alcohol-related deaths. Collectively, these three are known as deaths of despair. Due to this epidemic of deaths of despair, the overall life expectancy in the United States, starting in 2018, has begun to decline for the first time since the Great Depression.”

But there is hope, Kheriaty encouraged. Religious faith and practice are among the strongest protective factors against suicide found in research, he said. Religious faith “can be an important part of addressing the problems that we’re talking about today,” he said.

“My colleague Tyler VanderWeele at Harvard School of Public Health published a study of suicide and religious participation among women in the United States. … Against the grim backdrop of the increasing suicide rates that I mentioned before, this study found that some groups remain protected from the rising tide of despair and self-harm,” Kheriaty said. “What we see here is that those who attended religious service once a week or more were five times less likely to take their own lives. Those who identified as either Catholic or Protestant had a suicide rate about half of that of women in general in the U.S. and of the nearly 7,000 Catholic women in the study who said they attended Mass more than once a week, daily Mass attendees, not one of them in the study committed suicide.”

Religious practice was more important than mere affiliation, Kheriaty said. Self-identified Catholics who didn’t attend Mass had comparable suicide rates to other women in the study.

“Religious faith can instill a sense of meaning and purpose that transcends present circumstances or difficulties,” Kheriaty said. “It turns out the most strongly predictive factor of death by suicide is not how sick the person is, or how many symptoms he or she exhibits, or how much physical pain the person is suffering, nor economic factors, whether the person is rich or poor. The most dangerous factor for suicide is a person’s reported sense of hopelessness. The man without hope is the likeliest candidate for suicide.”

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, said that prisoners in concentration camps ascribed a phrase for fellow prisoners who lost hope, a phrase roughly translating to, “the walking dead,” Kheriaty said.

The prisoners who lost hope showed physical characteristics of their despair. Hopelessness was visible in the person’s eyes, their countenance, and in time, they would stop eating or drinking, Kheriaty said.

“Man literally cannot live without hope,” Kheriaty said. “But hope can’t be delivered by a medical prescription. Here, only the Church, I would suggest to you, ultimately offers to people what they so desperately need, and I would suggest that all Catholics, clergy, religious, laity have something really important to contribute.”

As Catholics, “we believe that Christ’s suffering and death on the cross can give our own anguish meaning,” Kheriaty said. The Catholic faith doesn’t promise a life free from suffering or affliction.

“While on the one hand we do all we can to treat mental illness and to reduce the suffering associated with it, we cannot and never will completely eradicate it,” Kheriaty said. “Not all afflictions can be avoided, and not all illnesses can be cured. In this fallen world, some degree of suffering is inevitable. I would suggest for all of us: When we suffer, we understandably want to comprehend the reasons for our anguish. My patients often ask me, as I ask when I’m in pain, ‘Why is this happening? Did I do something wrong to deserve this? Is God punishing me?’ Now, these questions are perfectly natural, but this side of eternity, we’re not usually given the answers to these questions. Our finite intellects are probably not capable of comprehending the reasons behind God’s providential designs.”

Anthony Isacco, program director and professor of clinical psychology at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota, said modern secular psychology has been shifting toward an approach to suffering that includes three A’s, as he calls it: Avoidance, affirmation and autonomy.

“(A) psychologist or mental health professional that takes an avoidance-based approach will tell people, ‘If pain and suffering is bad, you just need to avoid it. A marriage is experiencing difficulty? Get a divorce. If you don’t like your parents, don’t talk to them. Have different political views from your friends? Don’t be friends with them anymore. Avoid those people that you don’t like,’” Isacco said.

These three approaches are a means to avoid pain and suffering, which actually cannot be avoided, Isacco said.

Kheriaty addressed the “staggering devastation” of the opioid crisis which “we are still dealing with in the United States.” Kheriaty said it is the worst drug crisis this country has faced.

“Since the year 2000, the number of deaths by opioid overdose has quadrupled. Drug overdose is now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50. I would suggest to you this is a serious indictment on contemporary society and calls for a compassionate response on the part of the faithful,” Kheriaty said.

Joe Cassady, a local Catholic and father of five, said his medical anomalies started when he was 14. He’s had joint pain since age 15. Following a traumatic brain injury from flipping a car, he had his first migraine when he was 17.

“I got diagnosed very early with what they call chronic daily migraine syndrome, fibromyalgia, trigeminal, or occipital neuralgia, and more currently, one of my doctors said I more than likely have EDS (Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) because my joints pop out very easily,” Cassady said.

For over 20 years, “doctors would throw meds at it,” Cassady said.

In 2012, while teaching theology at St. Thomas Academy in Mendota Heights, he collapsed in the lunchroom, Cassady said. What followed were weeks in the neurological rehab ward. After he was released, he was assigned to a pain center.

“That started 14 years straight of just amping up more and more opioids,” Cassady said.

Over time, his opioid dosage increased to a point where a nurse told him, “Be careful, you’re taking what’s called a terminal dosage, which means if an average person took the amount of opioids you’d take in a day, they would overdose.”

Every three weeks, Cassady received injections through his head and neck for nerve blocks. Every three months for 14 years, he received Botox.

“In those 14 years, me and my wife had four kids, and what I can say is … the silent sufferers are the families of those of us who have the physical pain. My wife is a saint in her own making, going through everything that we have,” Cassady said. “What really started to kick me was for almost five years, I was essentially bedridden, and was on so many meds that I would have about one to two functional hours a day, and I would try to spend those with the kids.”

Finally, Cassady said, a doctor didn’t ask how he was feeling. She asked him, “What is your goal?”

He told her that he wanted to be able to play on the floor with his children. The doctor told him that he was never going to be able to do that with his dosages and treatments. She told him to go home, think about it, and decide what he wanted to do.

“Twenty-six months (and) eight days ago was my last narcotic pill,” Cassady said to loud applause from those attending the event.

“I have a whole new treatment group now that includes (people) like my neighbor Chad (Parsons) here,” Cassady said.

Parsons is a nurse practitioner who also spoke on the panel. As a Catholic, Parsons said he believes the core of people’s lives is being with other people. As a medical professional, that doesn’t go away, he said. While working in a hospital in the intensive care unit, often the question asked of patients is ranking their scale of pain.

But Parsons believes the right questions are about how to live life more fully, like playing  with one’s own children or attending a wedding despite chronic pain.

“When you get into the actual ins and outs of life, we’re worried about something else,” Parsons said. “Can I do what I need to do? And can I do what I want to do? And how that fits into life.”

Parsons said he can’t always take the pain away. But as a nurse practitioner, he gets to be present for people.

Neal Buddensiek, a physician in palliative care who also was on the panel, said the aim of his job is for his patients to find the “sweet spot” in suffering.

“We may not be able to take away everything. There’s a lot of baggage. There’s a lot of life history. There’s a lot of complex body issues, emotional, psychic issues, spiritual issues, and that milieu, that fusion, that synergy makes you who you are today,” Buddensiek said.

“I’ve debated with a lot of atheists through my time, and a lot of them, what they want to bring up is pain,” Buddensiek said. “And it’s like, well, if you don’t believe in anything beyond this world, there’s no point in the suffering of this world.”

Read the full story at The Catholic Spirit.