Travels Through Psychiatry

  Please note that this piece is available on another site, as a guest post, at this link: Guest Post: A Psychiatric Survivor Comes to a Place of Understanding

You might wonder, if you’ve read much of my blog, if I support psychiatry, if I believe in its pursuits. I do. But I reserve my hopes in psychiatry for those clinicians who undertake the trust each individual puts before them in good faith. I admire psychiatrists with interest in the full scope and picture of each in their care. They see and hear, even feel, what each person tells before administering treatments for symptoms, treatments they recognize as limited in many ways, and so they apply them with care and great regard for effects both positive and negative. When I’m watching documentaries about discovering the universe, over time how people have sought to understand the sun, moon, stars, and Earth’s place, ranging from assigning them godlike qualities, through gradually realizing in committed, repetitive observation that all these rotate, then that Earth is not the center, risking heresy to say so, yet maintaining their course of further learning, I think of psychiatry. I ev...

Psychotropic medications, that I’d been a long time, some for 2 decades continuously, were suddenly stopped by the psychiatrist. I shouldn’t happen this way, ever, no matter the reason. But here’s how I can best estimate that it did happen. At a psych unit 2 weeks previously, the inpatient psychiatrist discontinued quetiapine because he said I was too sleepy. I was off it for a few days, then at home, I started taking it again right away. Shortly after, within a week, I met with my regular psychiatrist. I reported to her about the quetiapine being stopped briefly and that the other psychiatrist had concerns about me being on it. She decided, right then, that I should cease taking quetiapine and 2 other meds, benztropine and gabapentin, and to bring in what I had left for disposal the next day, so I did. Several days later I was sick, mostly with intestinal problems and dizziness, and unable to think clearly, but did manage to make a call for transport to a hospital. I was in seve...

  *This post contains these sensitive topics: drug use, self-harm, sexual assault. Twenty years ago, I woke up in a hospital bed, sat up, sighed deeply, and thought, it’s over, done, enough of this. Visitors gathered around the other occupied bed in the room, annoying and simultaneously sweet in chatter, emphasizing how alone I was. When the doctor signed off on me leaving, I pulled on jeans and caught a bus home. Leaning into the window, I confirmed that I’d changed inside, moved to a new place within. My mood, though remaining as grey as the low hanging fog, didn’t fade my resolve, my faith shining like the sun about to burst through clouds. And it was over, the constant sitting in my room inhaling deeply from a bong, calculating how to conserve the weed I had left, smoking a measured amount and holding the hit to get it all, making some art while listening to public broadcasting on a borrowed radio, stepping onto the porch for a coffee and cigarette, and plotting how to find m...

  I don’t want to interfere with anyone’s desire to try or continue taking psychiatric medications. Depression, anxiety, manic states, intrusive thoughts, and more cause suffering and are hard to manage. Certainly, I tried finding my help there, and these days lots of people defend that choice, rightfully so, but I feel forgotten. Why? It seems if I'm not in the absolutely defending taking psych meds group then I must be in the attacking group. I took psych drugs for a long, long time. I followed each psychiatrist’s instruction, believing the drugs could provide relief, and they didn’t. But still I tried. I tried more and more, in and out of psych units and psychiatrists’ offices and therapists’ offices and therapy groups, and yet I progressively became worse. How is that so, and yet no mental health professional stepped in to evaluate what the heck was going on there? There’s no clear answer, but now, after sometimes wild, sometimes debilitating withdrawal, I don’t take psych me...

ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) is a hotly debated psychiatric treatment, but beyond that, what are the parts of the procedure and effects on patients after that aren’t brought into the light? I’ve undergone ECT, so I come from a place of lived experience. I wrote this poem, slightly snarky in tone, but it does explain what happens, what ECT is about, in a better way than me writing straightforward text.           Try it, try it, ECT!           Safe! Effective! (*no guarantee)           Wheel you in on a stretcher bed           Electrodes stuck about your head         The IV’s in, soon you’ll be out         Can’t bite your tongue with this shoved in your mouth         Cuz you will seize, in a grand mal way         Succinyl keeping bone-breaking at bay     ...

  During the years psychiatrists attacked my mental distress, bipolar, and all the symptoms those encompassed with drug after drug, combined with this drug and that drug, the part of me that accesses creating art for self-exploration and focus deflated, sucked into grey flatness, a dimensionless, endless plain. When the psychiatrist stopped the meds combination I’d been taking for 3 years (quetiapine, lithium, benztropine, gabapentin, desvenlafaxine, pramipexole, naltrexone) without taper, my mind freaked out. After weeks of manic psychosis, insomnia punctuated by graphic nightmares, and lonely despair, my head cleared, and my brain yelled out to make sense of it all. I needed something, but what, I didn’t know. However, I started leafing through my old art, stuff I’d drawn in journals while pursuing an art degree, paintings and photos of paintings I’d given away or sold, and etchings and collages packed up in a box. To be honest, I never considered my art to be worthy, my rela...

  All of these images are mine, older plus fresher images that I cut, pasted, drew back into, filtered, and made into a new expression. If you're wondering, I do indeed deal with difficult issues when creating, but I also add in some sense of whimsy and humor. _________________________________________________