Sherry McLaughlin was featured in ADVANCE for Directors in Rehabilitation.

September 2007: Unstoppable Force
Sometimes, rehab can be therapeutic for the therapist.

9/1/2007

By Jonathan Bassett
ADVANCE

They were a motley crew, the McLaughlins of southeast Michigan. First, there was Doug and Sherry, happily married for 15 years, and their 13-year-old son Joshua, who was autistic and had almost no verbal communication.

There was also Jon, Doug’s much younger half-brother, taken in by the family as a struggling teenager. Rounding out the clan was Christina Cortez, Sherry’s cousin and mother of young Evelynn, both taken in by the McLaughlins when Christina developed a drug habit and needed help raising her daughter.

Still, they were a happy and successful--if unconventional--tribe. Doug ran a woodworking and interior design company, and his work could be seen in the finer homes of Oakland County. And Sherry McLaughlin, MSPT, OCS, CSCS, operated the Michigan Institute of Human Performance, a successful two-clinic practice in Warren, Mich. “I was handling life,” she says.

But Sherry’s world would change forever in February 2005, when Doug called her at the clinic in tears, saying he was having a breakdown. When she got home, she found that he had attempted suicide.

Doug shared a secret with his wife--he had suffered from unrelenting depression for years. “I had no idea that this rock-climbing, mountain-biking, talented woodworker would wake up in the morning in a darkness so heavy he couldn’t move,” she says.

Doctors put Doug on medication, which lifted the darkness and eased the suicidal thoughts, but it made Doug feel like he was “walking around with cotton in his head,” says Sherry. In February 2006, Doug quit the medication. That July, he took his own life.

“The last time we talked, he said ‘I’m so tired I can’t do the business anymore,’ ” remembers Sherry. “I said ‘I love you.’ That last phone call was such a gift.”

Rather than close the clinic she founded, work became Sherry’s outlet. After a 3-month hiatus, she returned, more committed than ever to her mission of improving the health of her community. “Staying at home and isolating myself after Doug’s death would have devastated me,” she says.

In addition to seeing up to 140 patients a week, the staff at MIHP holds workshops for clinicians, provides sport-specific athletic programs, and offers corporate fitness and injury prevention programs to large employers such as General Motors. McLaughlin is passionate about sharing research information with her colleagues, and has formed a nonprofit organization dedicated to that goal.

Every Wednesday she shuts the doors of MIHP to hold meetings with her think tank--movement specialists from diverse backgrounds that collect and disseminate the latest findings on biomechanics and functional training.

What ignites McLaughlin’s passion is the problem solving that comes with deconstructing the biomechanical puzzle and pinpointing faulty movements that give rise to pain. Her approach, which she named triPLAYnar technology, has underpinnings in athletic principles, but it carries over to all patient populations. The method recognizes that human movement emerges from the hips, the body functions on three planes, and pain isn’t an inevitable effect of aging or injury.

In the meantime, Sherry is also working on the third book in a series that chronicles her life. “It doesn’t need to sell a million copies,” says Sherry, who hopes to lift some of the stigma surrounding autism and depression. “If it helps just one person, it’s a success.”

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