Posted by Gracie2 on December 4, 2002, at 14:06:38
This website, the other posters on this website and the good Dr. Bob: you've been an incredible source of support and advice for me during the last few years, and I want to give back to you all by telling you, through really hard-earned experience, what I've learned about psychiatry and psychiatric medication over the last few years. I'm well on the road to recovery, I'm doing alright now, and I hope this posting will help others.
Without going into a lot of gruesome detail, I was exremely ill for a very long time. I was too sick to know that I was sick, and I battled recovery every step of the way. I hit bottom not once but three times. The first time, the police ended up taking me to the hospital to be committed. The second time, I was admitted to the hospital after I collapsed with seizures after an unintentional drug overdose. The third time, I was admitted to the hospital and had my stomach pumped after an intentional overdose. So, you know, I was obviously in bad shape. Nobody thought I was going to make it, including myself.
Unfortunately, I delayed my own diagnosis and treatment by not being honest with the psychiatrist and by screwing around with the medication dosage myself because I was having trouble with side effects. Before my body adjusted to the medication, I got very tired. This made me lethargic, so I started to put on weight. Gaining weight freaked me out, so I switched medications. Also, I would sometimes skip doses of medication because I wanted to drink. Although you can drink moderately while you're taking this medication that I'm taking,
you can't take the pills around the same time that you're actually drinking alcohol because it will make you sick. Finally, it occurred to me that if I took the medication in the morning, I wouldn't have to worry about drinking later on in the day. Now this seems obvious to me, but at the time,my judgement was so poor and my thinking was so skewed, it took me awhile to figure this out.Anyway, when I finally started to take the medication like I was supposed to do in the first place, good things gradually started to happen.
The fog started to lift, my thinking got clearer,
I was functioning on a much higher level. My panic attacks stopped, my insomnia went away, I slowed way down on the self-medication with recreational drugs and alcohol. My judgement got better, I started to take care of myself again.
But something still wasn't quite right.So on my next visit to the psychiatrist I told him, okay, I'm taking the right medicine at the right dosage, I've improved a lot, my bipolar symptoms are going away. But I'm not happy, I still feel like my life sucks. I hate my job, I can't get focused, I don't care about anything,
I don't want to go out and have fun. I don't know what to do with my life.So then the good doctor prescribed an SSRI for depression. By this time I was more familiar with how psychiatric medication operates in your brain,
so I didn't expect immediate results and I tried not to worry about side effects. Low and behold,
after taking the anti-depressant exactly as directed for some weeks, my depression started to lift. At first, it was just a matter of not being quite so hard to get out of bed in the morning and do the things I needed to do to get through the day. Then, I started to get a little more organized so my surrounding environment wasn't all mess and chaos. Then, I started doing things like setting appropriate goals for myself, stuff
like that. Now, I'm still trying to pick up the pieces of my life, all the damage I caused to other people with all my crazy bullshit. I'm steadily re-building a working relationship with my son and other relatives and my few remaining friends. I don't know if my marriage can be salvaged, we're just taking it day by day. Even if it doesn't work out, I'm pretty sure now that I'll be okay.So, by the grace of God, I'm somehow still here among the living, and if I can help anybody else
by sharing the following information with you all,
then maybe I can help put back into the world a little of the cosmic good that saved my life.If you want to take full advantage of psychiatry and psychiatric medications to help yourself get better, you have to follow a few hardcore rules:
1.) Even if your GP is willing to dispense psychiatric medication, don't go that route. Altough your family doctor is probably aware of how and why these drugs work, he isn't an expert.
(Please substitute "she" where appropriate in the dialogue.) The effects of psychiatric medication need to be monitered by an experienced psychiatrist at intervals determined by your psychiatrist.2.)There are a couple of huge mental barriers that you have to cross to develop a good working relationship with your psychiatrist. The first one is, you have to admit to yourself that you could probably use some psychiatric help. Nobody on earth wants to need medication to function, but if you want to get better, there it is.
The second one is, you have to be honest with your psychiatrist, which means that you have to go in and admit to things that you're not particularly proud of to a stranger. But you can't think of it in that way. The guy is not a priest and he's not a friend, he's a doctor. He's not there to judge you on a moral basis and even if he did, an experienced psychiatrist has seen
more crazy crap than you could ever dream up, the things that people do to themselves and each other. So as far as he's concerned, there's nothing new underneath the sun. When you go in and there and tell him, "Well, I'm not feeling too good right now because last week I drank an entire bottle of vodka in one night, I went out and picked up 3 guys and brought them home and we all had sex, and then I felt so rotten after they left that I beat my kid"...when you tell him those things, you're describing your symptoms to a doctor. He makes an educated guess about why you're acting in this manner, and prescribes or adjusts your medication to help you start feeling better about yourself and stop doing those things.
Most people are surprised when a psychiatrist usually doesn't say, "Well, why do you think you did those things?" because that's analysis. If you want analysis, that's a different matter. A lot of upset people combine medication and analysis, but personally, I never wanted analysis so I can't offer much information on that subject.
If you think you might benefit from analysis, your psychiatrist can offer information.3.) Once you've been prescribed medication, if you want it to work, you must stay the course.
You can't screw around with it and if you do, the results end up being anywhere from useless to dangerous. So take your pills and take them as directed and keep taking them. Don't run out of medication and don't fool with the dosage yourself. If you get concerned about side effects,
discuss that with the psychiatrist, but don't stop taking them without his advice by quitting cold turkey or "tapering" without his supervision, because the consequences can be awful. These are powerful drugs and you have to take them seriously.4.) Don't lose hope. Psychiatric medications do work. But first, you have to be correctly diagnosed with a specific disorder, and then you
have to take a specific drug designed to treat that disorder for a length of time before good things start happening in your brain. Often, other
people will start noticing improvement before you do. One of the worst things you can do is to keep switching medications because you want a new medication to work faster. Even if you haven't noticed visible improvement after a few weeks,
the drug has been at work in your brain, lining up the troops in a certain type of formation. If you keep taking the drug, more and more troops keep falling into line and you begin to develop a
crack Army. If you stop taking the drug or fool around with dosage, good things stop happening,
it all falls apart and you're back to square one.Well, that's it. If I can get better, anyone can,
so everybody hang in there.
-Gracie
poster:Gracie2
thread:130543
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20021203/msgs/130543.html