I wanted to love Chicago Med Season 11 Episode 16.
Dr. Charles has always been my favorite character because he was the exception to the general TV rule of making mental health treatment into a cliche or worse, laughing at the idea of mental illness.
A story about how a burnt-out practitioner could have a breakdown of his own could and should have been powerful, but it was unfortunately not handled realistically, frustrating me instead of entertaining me.
The Suicide Prevention Call At The Heart of Charles’ Distress Was Handled All Wrong
I was a crisis worker on a suicide prevention hotline for several years, so the opening scene got my hackles up.
Risk assessment should always be the first part of any call on such a hotline, and that’s especially important when someone opens the call by almost hanging up and then admitting they want to hurt themselves.
Not only did Dr. Charles fail to assess the caller’s risk of imminent danger until halfway through the call, but his actions were inappropriate for a hotline.
He didn’t use any kind of active listening, instead relying only on empathy, and was far too confrontational with a potentially suicidal person.
To give the Chicago Med writers the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they wanted to show that Charles couldn’t adapt to the context of a quasi-anonymous hotline rather than working in the hospital.
However, if that were the case, he should have had to debrief with a supervisor on the hotline after the call, and no such scene occurred.
Describing all the ways he didn’t follow safety protocols would take up far too much time. However, it especially irked me that he made zero attempt to find out the caller’s location and then relied on Atwater to find the person in time.
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There was no guarantee that the caller was even in Chicago when Charles reached out to local police.
Additionally, suicide prevention requires teamwork. It’s not one person doing everything — where I worked, there were always enough people working together that someone who was not on a call could reach out to the on-call clinician and the appropriate emergency services department.
The Rest of Chicago Med Season 11 Episode 16 Was a Pile-On
My worst concern about that opening scene is that anyone who saw the PSA about calling for help if you’re suicidal at the end might decide not to bother after seeing this inaccurate depiction of what to expect.
Despite that problem, however, I might have forgiven the writers for taking creative license if the rest of Chicago Med Season 11 Episode 16 had focused on only one case of Charles’ instead of giving him a bunch of patients in a row whom he couldn’t reach.
It’s realistic that an emergency room doctor would have several cases back-to-back, but it didn’t work dramatically.
It felt as if the writers were engineering a crisis for Charles by having one patient after another reject his help or accuse him of not understanding their needs, instead of focusing on one case that made the point that he couldn’t deal with his failure on the hotline.
Sage’s Case Would Have Been More Powerful If There Were More Focus On It, However…
…there is one big plot hole here that annoyed me.
Dr. Charles’ scenes with Sage and his consultation with her sister were among the strongest in this trainwreck of an episode, but it didn’t make sense for him to keep treating her.
How did you feel about the way crisis after crisis piled on for Dr. Charles?
Hit the comments with your thoughts, and don’t forget to share this article with your friends.
I imagine psychiatrists have the same code of ethics that I did as a social worker — if you’re not the one who is best equipped to treat someone, refer them elsewhere.
A female patient who believes male doctors will never take her seriously because of her gender fits that description.
Charles was not going to get her to trust him over time or convince her that he wasn’t like other male doctors, and it was unethical for him to try.
Whether or not Sage was objectively “right” that he was dismissing her health concerns because of misogyny doesn’t matter. She felt that way, so the only chance of helping her would have been to allow a female doctor to take over this case.
It’s possible she would have seen such a woman as betraying her gender, but at least there was a chance of building a therapeutic alliance, which there was not with Charles, and nobody explained why he didn’t recuse himself from this case.
I wish this story had been written better.
The idea that women’s pain is often dismissed by doctors as imaginary or psychological is important and interesting, but it was introduced simply as an obstacle for Charles to try to overcome.
Despite his own struggles, Charles should have been professional enough to realize that Sage was projecting when she accused him of being a fraud who gets high off faking illness, especially given that he had just helped the little boy who was pretending to be a cat a few minutes earlier.
I know that Charles’ reactions from that point forward were supposed to show that he was losing his ability to be rational, but his inability to deal with this problem was so out of character that it was hard to take him seriously.
I felt like I should empathize with him, but all I saw was scene after scene of a seasoned psychiatrist acting like a teenager who had not yet learned to regulate his emotions and couldn’t deal with stress.
The final scene was also wildly exaggerated.
We didn’t need him staggering around for several minutes or having visions of his mother to get the point, and by the time it was revealed that he had collapsed and possibly had just had a stroke, I was too exhausted by this ridiculous sequence to care.
What did you think, Chicago Med fanatics?
Did you enjoy Charles’ breakdown more than I did? I hope so!
Hit the comments with your thoughts, and don’t forget to share this article with your friends so they can join in the fun.
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Chicago Med airs on NBC on Wednesdays at 8/7c and streams on Peacock on Thursdays.
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