Thursday, July 9, 2009

The old college try

Going back to the history of Joanna in Crazyville. So, I'm mentally ill, right? So says my lovely psychiatrist back in approximately 2001. Now you've got to understand something. I was, at this point extremely excited about becoming a nurse. All I wanted to do was get that R.N. license and go to work on a hospital floor. I wanted to be part of the system. I had the utmost faith that worked and that within its' bounds, I could be a genuine caregiver. I also looked forward to being a colleague of doctors, whom I imagined were all something like Gregory House. Assholes? Yes, but medically curious assholes who wanted to find the answer and would exhaust every possible resource investigating their patients symptoms. Me and the system were gonna make people better. So when I found out that I was ill, I became the single most compliant patient you could ever imagine. I took ALL the drugs, I kept EVERY appointment. I was completely honest about everything I felt. I didn't have that suspicion which people often bring into treatment because these people were my friends. And not only that, I might have to work with them some day.

This being the case, when I went to college, I dutifully kept up my treatment, despite the fact that up till then, my treatment had had little effect. The first week I went to the counseling center and made an appointment. I was assigned a therapist named Bill Russel and I have to hand it to this guy, he tried. His approach was psychoanalytic in nature, like Freud, Jung, and Erikson. We talked at length about my family situation, about dreams I had, about what my subconscious was trying to tell me. We came up with all kinds of reasons for my sadness and lack of self worth, and all kinds of reasons why logically they shouldn't be a problem. But we never addressed head on the fact that they were a problem and we never came up with anything to actually do about it. A year into this therapy Bill referred me to the campus psychiatrist. After telling her my life story, she prescribed Lithium and Seroquel. Again, no physical investigation, no insight as to what sort of therapy might be helpful, just drugs, and bigtimes drugs at that. Lithium is a very dangerous and uncomfortable drug to be on. It's therapeutic margin is very slim and if you're not VERY careful about your sodium intake, or you get sick and vomit,(a side effect of Lithium) you can become toxic like that. Even at "safe" levels, Lithium can damage the thyroid, kidneys,heart, and liver, all organs that you pretty much need. Seroquel is an antipsychotic. The combination of lithium and an antipsychotic pretty strongly suggests a diagnosis of bipolar disorder which this doctor insisted she believed I did not have. What did I have? She didn't yet know. She never found out either. I was given the non-diagnosis of mood disorder NOS (not otherwise specified). And since then, every doctor I've seen has taken one look at these medications and gone, "Well, someone prescribed these once for some reason, so you must be bipolar." Nevermind the fact that I've never had a manic episode, or especially impulsive behavior, or even, (especially back in college) pronounced irritability or rage. The drugs said bipolar. The symptoms became irrelevent. As to their effectiveness, at first I was so hopeful that a new approach was being tried that they seemed to work. Very quickly though, I fell back into my familiar patterns of anxiety and depression. The Lithium was increased, and I became toxic. It was reduced again and then maintained as if everything were fine. As long as I wasn't suicidal they were content to let me suffer because in their minds, I shouldnt' have been suffering, after all the lithium levels were fine so clearly the drugs were working. I spent about a year and a half like that. That's when things got really desperate

1 comment:

  1. Yeah, that placebo effect is a powerful thing. People have all kinds of "positive response" to sugar pills. I always wonder, when people try a new drug, do they feel better because of the drug's actual effect, or because they *expect* to feel better?

    Also, I cannot believe you actually saw a therapist with a psychoanalytic approach! Every therapist I've ever talked to has been really anti-analysis. They're always, like, "Freud's method wasn't scientific." And then we spend six weeks or two years with me talking about why I hate myself and them saying, basically, "You should stop that." And I wonder how scientific *that* is. I feel fairly certain that I've only ever received "supportive" or "non-specific" therapy. And some of it did more harm than good.

    ReplyDelete