Hidden Gems: Meet Mark McGonigle of Wise Mind Therapy Services LLC
Today we’d like to introduce you to Mark McGonigle.
Hi Mark, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Becoming a therapist started with the journey through the wilderness of my own anxiety and depression at the age of 17. I like to view the onset of these difficulties as my first invitation into personal and spiritual growth, and honestly I can trace the issues back through my whole life. I was the eighth of nine children, a robust and energetic Irish Catholic family in Brookside, Kansas City, MO — but also a complicated family with a lineage of trauma, survival, and a strong will to live.
Both of my parents were children of the depression who lost their fathers young and had to endure through hardship. My maternal grandfather died tragically while receiving psychiatric care for (what appears to me) an episode of intense PTSD revolving around a family murder he witnessed at the age of 10. He was the primary witness who exonerated his uncle by his testimony. He was urged into psychiatric care by the same uncle, and in the hospital was administered Insulin Shock Therapy (only practiced for a few years in that era) and it killed him. I have always felt the weight of this heritage through my mother and I sometimes wonder if my work is to make amends for the ways that mental health care has not always been kind or helpful. My father was truly a child of the depression whose physician father died of influenza contracted in his work when my father was 6. My dad served in WWII — a bomber pilot shot down on his first mission, completing 62 more missions after that. His PTSD and tendency to self-medicate with alcohol, had a large impact on the family.