Travels Through Psychiatry

  Almost every day I wake up and I hate it, sorry I’m conscious, resenting the hours ahead of thinking and being in this apartment box, and even that the cat needs food, and doing my own basic care, and that I feel this way again, again, again. Even on rare days, when I come to with optimism, some excitement about the day, I don’t trust it. It’s probably an upswing, the start of an overly active period that will shrink away into darkness. Or, I’ll   hit a wall, break into a million pieces, once more to pick up, once more to glue back into some fashion of myself. Some would advise that I need psychiatric assistance. I’ve been through that already. Not that I don’t run that around my pessimistic mind, head still on my pillow, trying to convince myself that helpful psychiatry exists, in my geographic area, that accepts my current healthcare coverage. Make a plan! Make a budget and start leafing through who is out there and calling and making appointments and before you know...

  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...

  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...