Travels Through Psychiatry

  What did I do for 40 years in mental health treatment besides take medications, sit in psych units, pepper in some ECT, and do psychiatrist check-ins? Therapy of course. I can’t leave out therapy. Often, I signed up for psychotherapy that ended up being tutoring in coping skills. Or, the psychotherapist approached me fearfully, which did nothing to coax me from my own trepidation over revealing myself. Other times, therapists were all over the board with weird stuff, distractions from the promise that, yes, today we’ll get down to letting you talk about hard stuff. My talking would be cut off – what? Oh, identify your cognitive distortion off this worksheet, or let’s do a brief guided meditation, or try this tapping, or recenter with 5 things you see, hear feel, then 4 things, 3, 2, 1. I didn’t bolt out the door because I thought this was psychotherapy, at least part of it. Maybe if I stuck around, delving safely into deeply hidden problems would happen. It didn’t. I could go o...

  Back in the summer of 2019, when I was in the throes of wretched withdrawal coming off 5 psych meds (details are in my other posts, like Update on My Psych Drug Withdrawal ), I had to re-learn sleeping. Most of that was due to some 20 years on quetiapine, a powerful sleep agent, and suddenly without it, I hit big problems. If I could doze off, vivid nightmares would jolt me awake. While up, I was not only exhausted, but extremely sensitive to, well everything, but one particularly glaring issue was the bare white walls. I’d stripped my apartment down (because I thought I’d be moving 2000 miles away, but that’s another story) and now the empty walls ricocheted my paranoid fears straight back into my head. I needed certain colors to be on those walls, wasn’t sure which, but would know when I saw them. So, I looked online, and I found inexpensive tapestries that seemed right, plus they could be delivered within 2 days. Once I’d tacked them up with push pins, a warmth enveloped me, a...