Coming off Psychotropics, the Raw Account
In this post, which is about my early psych drug withdrawal, I present my notes, doctors' notes and an administrative letter which I scanned to image form. I call it "the raw account", because it documents what was going on then, over 3 years ago, rather than how I've filtered it through my experiences since. That's important. I provide a brief explanation of each record, and if you'd like more detail, please see the article I wrote for Mad in America at this link: Reckless Psychiatric Treatment Spun Me Out of Control, which contains more about my psych history and drugs the psychiatrist discontinued without taper.
My main point in this post is to show how withdrawal not only ravaged my mind and body, but also my relationships. Furthermore, medical professionals refused my account of what happened. The beginning months were soul-crushing, and recovering is difficult, even a few years on, even with better insight.
These are my own notes, written as part of my appeal to the mental health center to be assigned a different psychiatrist. The problem lay in their policy to not grant psychiatrist switches without first trying to work through the problem with the current one. (Keep in mind, I was very physically ill as I also had to carry on this administrative battle.)
Thus, it was easy to deny that my rights were violated, as I was deemed uncooperative, spelled out in this letter. (Note: They also only addressed one medication being discontinued when it was actually five.)
The next two documents are records from the medical hospital that treated me several days into severe withdrawal. They initially thought I'd overdosed even though I told them it was medications being stopped. (When you're a psych patient, doctors tend toward not believing you.)
