Tag Archives: antipsychotics

How long does it take you to get over a “break-up”? How long *should* it take?

Posted on August 10, 2010 by | 2 Comments

With the spark of renewed faith in the blogosphere to create communities of like-minded thinkers, unite people from all around the world, around the world (that song will be stuck in my head for some time now)…and to serve as a (“virtual” :razz: ) environment to facilitate useful debate among open-minded people: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, repeat…I spent the rest of a lazy Sunday “surfing” – in particular, the “SeededBuzz” networking site.  Although advertised as a “free blog marketing tool”, which it is, I have found it to be a place where I encounter some of the most interesting thoughts floating around “cyberspace”, and fodder for a lot of interesting discussion, as the idea of the site is to respond to other writers’ posts on one’s own blog – often in the form of a question or a casual poll.

I jumped at one particular “seed” (summary of post/question posed by another author), as I had been discussing the same question with a friend the other night…actually, I’ve talked about it with a few girlfriends over the past year.  (Note to self: a male perspective would be interesting – guys – please comment with your perspectives!) The question is: “How long is ‘too long’ to look back after a divorce or break-up?  When is it time to let go of the past?”

There is a slight difference between this question and the one I and my girls have been ruminating over, however.  I suppose we’re not the women of Sex and the City with their “rules”, including that “half of the time spent with a man” is the correct amount of time to spend sulking over breaking up with him.

:lol: We’ve been trying to decide how short is “too short” to stop thinking about a divorce or break-up?  Are we “bad people” for letting go of the past and carrying on with our own lives too fast?

I suppose this may be true for many strong, independent, career-oriented women, who don’t really have the time to spend obsessing over a lost lover.  But I think other factors are also involved.  When a man begins treating me poorly, being rude to my friends, insulting my intelligence (this multiplied exponentially when insulting the intelligence of women in general), caring less about my happiness than my ability to help him successfully get some semen to come out of his penis, that man very quickly becomes very unattractive to me.  He could be a young George Clooney in his ER days (the only celebrity “character” I think I’ve ever had any kind of crush on!).  A man whose bones I once wanted to jump every time I saw him suddenly becomes disgusting – he might as well be a 70 year-old asking, “hey, are you working?”  (when I smiled at a man carrying home a case of beer at 9:30 am this morning, as I smile at everyone walking down the street, this was his response, so his repulsive face, body, and stance are fresh in my mind, and just happen to epitomize the same repulsion that overcomes me when the aforementioned shift in a lover’s character occurs.)

***

(Explaination of Tarot Card pictured above: this was the “best of all possible outcomes considering this path” card that came up in my tarot reading on June 30th, the day before the Canada day camping trip that marked the beginning of the end.  The image of the woman and man turned away from each other is quite vivid and self-explanatory.  I tried so hard to be the all-seeing cat, but alas, I am merely human…and apparently, quite talented at summoning the power of the cards…call me crazy!)

***

Before the man, with whom I thought I had a love that would grow old, left, I had already reached this stage of utter “turned-offnesss”.  I felt guilty, but nothing could shake it, and my lady friends understood completely, although they warned – “Just don’t tell him that, though!”  I remember that same advice being given to me last year, by different women, in a place 2000 miles away.  I guess my “standards”, as some would call them, though I prefer to think of them as very basic expressions of respect and love for a partner, remain the same across time and space; They will never change.

Finally, in pondering why I “get over a break-up” so quickly, my one “positive” trait on that damn scale between neuroticism and extroversion (take the absolutely meaningless test here if you’re really bored!) )- one of the most bizarre false dichotomies I’ve ever come across :???: – is “adaptability to new situations”.  When I was fourteen, it took me about a week to get used to living in Japan by myself.  What is more traumatic – leaving your family overseas for four months as a fourteen year-old, or leaving a man behind as a twenty-six year-old?

I admit, I got quite caught up in the drama when I learned of “Alarryk’s” website, dedicated to the classic scapegoating and slander of a woman.  The madwoman, the witch, using her dangerous sexuality to entrap men, all while stirring and stirring and stirring her brew (and apparently, sampling it in high doses..??).  I really enjoyed playing Hecate in a grade five Macbeth show.  I even have a vial of Hecate’s herb, Rue, (much different than Syrian Rue – do not mistake one for the other if you are experimenting with ethnobotanicals!…;), but it is not something to chow down on – it is actually a poison, that if taken with enough care may enduce a spontaneous abortion – so perhaps I should have been doing so!

I also really enjoyed writing my honour’s thesis on this process of scapegoating women, which today, often leads to a woman being diagnosed with “Borderline Personality Disorder”.  The fact that I did not read a great deal of this trashy gossip column, but instead learned of it by playing, albeit through no choice of my own, the “telephone game” didn’t help.  And I am still afraid that the outrageous lies, the worst of which have now been removed from madpraxis.wordpress.com, will affect my reputation among my peers and professors.  Very irrational of me, no doubt, but I have never heard such blatant fantasies touted as facts, directed at my character…”junkie” was a new name, first granted to me by our hostess in Peru, and I’ve been called almost every one in the book.  And claims that I had falsified academic research to boot?  Also a first.

Finally, I realized what really bothered me about the contents of Alarryk’s new site, written with vigour that he refused to put into what was supposed to be a partnership – the original “Practice of Madness”, that I will now carry forwards on my own.  All of a sudden, the woman he stated so many times that he “hated“, who tried to strand me on the side of a desert highway in Peru, who made me carry 50 lbs. of baggage from hostel to hostel on a nightly basis, each place of “accommodation” becoming worse along with my medical condition, as I was under doctor’s orders not to do any heavy-lifting — look for the “silver lining”, scars, you got to have surgery two months earlier…he now referred to as some kind of all-knowing priestess.  In addition a letter from a wealthy, white, entrepreneur who caught wind of my subversive ethnography about the exploitation of Shamanism in Iquitos that, if discovered in June, would have had the two of us running around the criminology department laughing – what a perfect addendum! – I had caused a stir across hemispheres!  (and obviously “Alan Shoemaker”, exploiter of native Peruvians for the purpose of cashing in on white tourists participating in drug tourism/voyeruism, would be defending/denying his role in exposing the native population to respitratory and gastrointestinal disease previously non-existent in the area…”duh”?…;) ) - was instead used as a “headline” piece, and evidence of my “poor academic performance” (so far only a 3.7 or 3.8 in graduate school, tsk tsk!…;) ).

And we must not forget my “opiate addiction” to codeine for 7 days each month, and other “binges” (the contents of which I will never know…I guess I was just that far into these binges that I cannot recall them… ).  As you can tell, these idiocies make my blood boil – strange, as usually gossip doesn’t make me upset at all.  Rather, I find statements made about me “behind my back” incredibly amusing, and am only concerned with their ability to make me laugh, not only at what is being said, but at the fact that people are actually so perturbed by something I say or do that they take time out of their day to speak about it hushedly with others!  I’m not usually amused by gossip, although I may get a kick out of some shocking news about someone I knew many years ago, but I don’t get caught up in drama, I try to avoid it at all costs.

Finally I realized why this case of drama has affected me to such an extreme degree.

Yes, I was afraid that the fictional writing passed off as truth would negatively affect my reputation among my peers and professors.  I still am.  I am angry at myself for believing this with such rigour, but I am traumatized and terrified about the writings so clearly written by someone who has lost touch with reality.

Someone who has lost touch with reality.

I had an “a-ha! moment” that caused me to become overwhelmed by nausea that has not let up yet, and made my eyes spill over once again.

What if he never comes back to reality?  What if this is the end of this man’s time spent living – as a social being, a sympathetic being…

a functional being?

The face of a man called Donald, that I met during my first stay at the psych ward in Winnipeg, jumped into my mind and has, along with the upset stomach, refused to leave since.

Donald dressed eccentrically, but rather stylishly.  He loved music so much that when a certain song came on his walkman, he would eagerly put the headphones over my ears, while his eyes focused on the sky and an expression comparable to the pure happiness of a child crossed his face.  Donald told me that I looked an awful lot like his girlfriend – not using the prefix “ex”, although this was implied -  from graduate school at Ryerson in Toronto in the late-sixties, and fondly recalled the two of them sitting on the steps to the library, reading, talking, and smoking cigarettes.  He told me about her beautiful long, red hair, and I was incredibly flattered as he likened it to mine – aside from this, I truly enjoyed my conversations with Donald – the dried spit lining the corners of his lips, probably a side-effect of large dosages of antipsychotics, did not bother me like it did the rest of the patients.  So it wasn’t the most appealing thing to look at – why not look at his big blue eyes instead?  So they looked a little “crazy”, and sometimes he forgot about the cigarette pack in his pocket and picked up a filter from the ground to smoke, the ground, covered in butts and autumn leaves – he was still a man, much more pleasant and optimistic than most, and would never forget a favour asked earlier in the day, like hiding an extra banana from the food trays if he spotted one.  Donald was a thoughtful man, a smart man, but for some reason I seemed to be the only other patient he could talk to.  Thus, the role of being his only confidante sometimes became tiresome, but then he would say something like, “You look like a giant today, scars!”, and we would both break into giggles, “You know what, Donald?  I feel like a giant today!  Thank god someone else understands!”

After I was released Donald asked for my phone number, and I wrote it on the inside of a pack of matches.  When he started calling several times a day, talking about dates we could go on together, I had to ask him to stop.  It killed me to say the words, but not doing so would have been evil.  He was in his early-sixties, still residing at the hospital for an indefinite period of time, and he did not realize the inappropriateness of his requests – he was not living on the same plane of reality as the rest of us crazies.

He could not be convinced that the impossible was, well, not possible.  He could not really differentiate me from the girlfriend he had broken up with twenty-five years or so ago.  Once, I met him at the hospital cafeteria for a coffee after I had a shrink appointment.  He tried to kiss me.  It was time to say goodbye to Donald.  There were no hard feelings, but Donald could not grasp the fact that I was a 20 year-old undergraduate student, trying desperately to get it together and get off disability assistance and go back to school full-time, while living in an apartment with a boyfriend.

Donald could not differentiate between his life and mine.  He thought that everyone should see things as he did.  He couldn’t fathom any reality that existed outside his head.

On occasion, I would run into Donald in Winnipeg’s Osborne Village neighbourhood, and stop to chat and have a cigarette with him, still appreciating our conversations immensely.  He found the men he now lived with in a group home to be tiresome, and tried to spend most of the day in the village, reading paperback novels, John Grisham and Stephen King, smoking his cigarettes, sometimes stopping at a pub for a single beer.

Before I left Winnipeg, I saw Donald one last time.  His carefully groomed, short hair, was now a long, fuzzy, tattered ponytail.  His eyes were red-rimmed and a red and grey beard had sprouted from his clean shaven jaw.  He was missing several of his front teeth.  His eyes no longer looked “crazy”, as people often blanket-termed his expression, but looked liked he completely lost, searching for something or someone, and although he could not remember who or what, he continued to search.  I imagine that he is still searching.

Searching a barren landscape, trying to figure out why he is alone, wishing he had remembered to write down a phone number or directions, something that would lead him back to those steps, outside the library.


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Posted in Bipolar, Feminism and Madness, Other Survivors, The Psych Ward

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Correspondence as Creative Writing, as Living.

Posted on June 9, 2010 by | Leave a comment

I never just write letters.  I write letters.

I have ever since I was a child, and we got penpals from Australia to write to at a school there.  I wrote back the day I would receive a letter after anxiously awaiting for there to be mail for me!  I would include little gifts and stickers, or make a collage.  My letters are not so aesthetically pleasing now, as they are almost always typed in Times New Roman font.  But I still love a good letter, even if it’s in e-mail format.

After deleting my facebook account for three years, I reactivated it just to use the message function.  But facebook is like a virus and bacteria in one – it invades and then it grows.  When I found out who had been looking at my pictures it scared me very much.  I had begun spending hours procrastinating by “commenting” on people’s posts, and then there were too many to remember.  I realized I had to spend my time otherwise.  The correspondence was starting to decompose, to become so fragmented that I got kind of sad.  However, I have stayed in touch with a couple of important people on facebook, and our friendships grew because of it.  Now, I will continue to communicate with them by e-mail and in person, I hope, because I want it to be more real, not mediated by technology.  Beyond the word processor, that is.

A spontaneous letter.  A letter that captures the state of your mind at a particular time and place.  Not a letter of complaint, a letter, like the kinds soldiers used to write to their lovers during one of the World Wars.  Letters that are alive.

Letters have been a bit of a theme in my life.  I didn’t always remember writing them.  One day when I went to retrieve something from my dad’s house (you know, borrow, when you’re really poor, better to ask forgiveness than permission :wink: ) I found letters I had written to some kind of spirit when my mom got cancer, begging her to make her live.  When I lived in Japan when I was fourteen, with a “new family” – the most real family I ever had, really – the girl that stuck with me through high school…or was it me following her around, and her liking me because I was smart and kind of intimidating?  I digress.  We wrote each other essays every other day.  The letters that my best friend (clue: she’s was the blue one :wink: ) and I kept while I left Winnipeg for Montreal to go to university could be the contents of a book.  I even wrote scholarship applications for someone to get into Queens University just for the hell of it – it was a letter.  He is now an engineer and a pathological liar.  I also finished someone’s high school English class for writing their last assignment – it was to create a series of imaginary letters between two people – she would have done the same for me.  I never delete a single e-mail anymore, I mourn for the lost ones, and since I started doing this, I can trace the directions that relationships went in, disintigration, creation, falling apart or growing to become closer to someone than you ever imagined was possible.  The first thing I was able to write about what I experienced and saw during my seizure and coma I wrote in the form of a letter to my best friend, who somehow managed to pull me out of the other side, even though we soon wouldn’t speak for almost three years.

One drawback is that I feel is that because I love creative letters so much is that I’m not able to communicate as eloquently as I would like to in conversation.  I’m terrified of the phone and prefer face-to-face interactions (and letters!), but I still can’t pull it off very often.  I’ve grown to be articulate – a big accomplishment after being very quiet during most of my 7 year undergrad degree.  Yes, seven, you can laugh.

Blog posts are kind of like letters.  Letters that are read by strangers that could be anywhere in the world.  Perhaps they make them think of something new or use them to write a paper or even tell someone else about them. My grade eleven and twelve English teacher, Mrs. Greenhill, was and is, I’m sure, even though I haven’t seen her for years, a goddess in her own right, and she told me once, when we were alone, looking straight in my eyes, that I was going to become a writer.  Not an editor she emphasized, a writer.  Things I would write would be published.  I was in awe – all I had ever wanted, kind of secretly, since I was a child, was to write something that made other people think, or laugh, or cry.  I achieved all of these during grade twelve English class.

The people who were scared of me :twisted: and gossiped about me had to leave the room because they were sobbing because of something I wrote that involved the tumors sticking out of my mom’s neck when we said our last goodbyes. Morbid stuff.  Heavy stuff.  A letter to all of them.  A rant that I wrote when I was on mushrooms was photocopied and passed along to the most unexpected of my classmates.

I treasure letters, although I’m not nearly as fast at replying now.  I no longer have the freedom of a child – time.  I hate the fact that I no longer have the time to do all of the things I want to do in a day.  I think this has only started since grad school but I wonder about all of the time I lost while I was in a Clozaril (clozapine – atypical antipsychotic) haze for almost three years.  Would I have had the time then?  Who else would I be writing to?  Who wouldn’t I be writing to.  Where would I even be, instead of here?

Very Sincerely,

scars xoxo

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Posted in Poetry, Prose, Personal

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On Laxatives …and medication interactions

Posted on May 29, 2010 by | 2 Comments

*Rumble Rumble*

An exciting topic for an exciting night!

No, I will not be joining a former roommate and her “Young Liberal” boyfriend at “some kind of lounge with three other guys”, and not only because that sounds like an incredibly horrid scene.

I will also not be joining them because I have just had to chug back yet another bottle of “Citro-Mag” – a laxative that is usually taken before radiography, but that I’ve been forced to take annoyingly often since my physical illness/surgery.  This stuff literally turns your poop into foam – are you disgusted yet?

There is a reason for this post, aside from being housebound and rumbling: laxatives and medication interactions, or, on the other hand, the unfortunate lack thereof.  Allow me to explain.

While I was ill, I had to take hydromorphone (Dilaudid).  The stuff is incredibly constipating, much more so than the antipsychotic Clozaril/clozapine was – I’m recalling a particularly hilarious memory of when I went to my father’s house for dinner and finally had to use the toilet while on that drug.  I clogged the toilet with one massive excretion of feces (i.e. one “piece”;) and he was convinced that I had been trying to flush something else – what exactly?  “Evidence” of some sort?  No, dad, I was only using the toilet for what toilets are meant for.

Since my experience with pain and painkillers, I have spoken with several others about their own, and almost everyone I have talked about this with has had to return to the hospital for a second time (after their initial pain condition was resolved, via surgery or otherwise) because of impacted bowels.  Doctors do not let you know that when you’re taking opiate painkillers, you should also be taking a laxative and stool softener every day!  It was long after I was off the hydromorphone that my GP told me, “well, of course you should have been taking a laxative and stool softener with that…”

“Of course”???  Excuse-me, but I am the patient here.  Believe it or not, despite the fact that I am also a “mental patient”, I had never taken a strong opiate painkiller like this before to get high, and was completely unaware of the damage it would cause my bowels!  So I find myself asking, is this now another pharmaceutical that I will have to add to the list of things I take regularly?

Aside from that, laxatives make your regular medications slide right through you without entering your bloodstream.  If you’re on Effexor and are suddenly having brain-zaps, or if you’re on Clozaril and suddenly lose ten pounds and feel incredibly energetic, or if you’re on the birth control pill and get pregnant… did you take a laxative in the four hour radius surrounding taking your other meds?  This is the reason for the sudden “abnormality”.  Try not to fret…heh…

For anyone who has to take this stuff, for whatever reason – if you’re prepping for a colonoscopy, or trying to empty yourself after taking painkillers and being a victim of the medical negligence of doctors who do not tell you how to keep your digestive tract healthy while on opiods, the new cherry flavour is much preferable to the traditional “lemon-lime” flavour.  It tastes like cherry kool-aid used to – about twenty years ago now, I suppose – it tasted much better, more like real cherries.  It’s slightly carbonated, perhaps this is what causes the foaminess.  I bet it would taste pretty good with vodka or gin, if you ever wanted to serve up a real interesting cocktail for a good friend. :wink:

I think it’s time to hit the toilet, so I’m going to sign off before I disgust you any further. 

Yay for Citro-Mag!!!  Boooooooo for medical negligence, which seems to pretty much be a factor in any dealings with “medical experts” these days… :roll:

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Posted in Sociology of Medicine

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Conduct Disorder Camp?

Posted on May 1, 2010 by | Leave a comment

I have a confession to make…I’m an “ER” aficionado.  Even though I can’t stand the way “mental illness” is portrayed in the series.  How many times do we hear one of the fictional docs scream, “5 of Haldol, stat!“?

However I’ve never done any kind of content analysis on the longest-running medical drama series created by Michael Crichton.  I started watching the show with my mom when it first came out, and one of the last things we did together was watch it, her stroking my hair as she lay on her deathbed – I had stopped crying, having found out a few days previous that she would not live, that there was no hope left.  It was a happy moment of stillness and acceptance and love.  Perhaps that’s why I’m so attached to the series.  I had to get drunk when I was sixteen, after seeing Dr. Mark Greene, Dr. Doug Ross’s (played by George Clooney – I admit, I have had a bit of a crush :lol: ) original compatriot die of brain cancer, with the lovely Dr. Elizabeth Corday, his new wife, with his new baby smiling through their last days with him.  I still cry when I hear the reggaé version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, the song that played at the episode’s climax.  I’m getting emotional just thinking about it.  Phew!

Still, like I said, the program does not exactly challenge hegemonic, stigmatic, false beliefs about the “mentally ill”.  This can be seen most clearly during the episodes when Dr. Abby Lockhart’s bipolar mother, played by Sally Field, comes around for a visit.  Poor Abby is an alcoholic and her brother is also bipolar and commits suicide eventually, as their mom did everything from abandon them for months at a time when they were little children, to chase them around with knives.

Here are a few examples of her bipolar behaviour:

Abby & Maggie 1

Abby & Maggie 2

Abby & Maggie 3

Not exactly a challenge to the DSM‘s list of symptoms..

That’s not what this post was spurred by however.  The other day a rerun from the mid-2000s was on – I do have the first twelve seasons on DVD, well, knock-offs ordered from Hong Kong via E-Bay, but I’m missing a bit of a chunk in there, I have not seen every single episode ever made – and a young boy, appearing to be between about ages 9 and 11, comes into the ER after escaping a boarding school/boot camp institution of sorts, where parents can send children with conduct disorder to have them resocialized into obedient young citizens.  At this camp that sounds like something from a horror film, this young boy claims to have been fed “Seroquel, Risperdal, Clozaril, Halidol…”, listing off the drugs quickly – he is apparently as familiar with them as I am, at age 10 or so.

Now, I am well aware that children are being fed antipsychotics like candy by doctors, parents and teachers, especially since the “advent” of “Pediatric Bipolar Disorder”.  However, I have never heard of antipsychotic boot-camp for kids.  Do such places actually exist?

I can’t hunt down a clip of this episode, although YouTube is blooming with clips of Abby and bipolar mom “Maggie” sparring – I guess this is more “entertaining”.  The episode I’m talking about ends with the “conduct disorder”-riddled boy’s mom coming to the ER, clueless about what’s been happening at “camp”, and then taking the opinion of the psy-experts running the private program guaranteed to fix your kid, over that of Dr. Luka Kovac, the ER doc that agrees with me, that this is child abuse.  The child is given a shot of Haldol, and is rushed away in a wheelchair, drooling.

Was this episode exaggerating the way in which kids are drugged, or are there actually “Conduct Disorder Camps”?  If anyone reading this knows of one, please, do tell…

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Posted in Child Psychiatry

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a rant before going into interzone, 2005

Posted on March 31, 2010 by | Leave a comment

I must have written this early in the morning of the day that I disappeared for several before New Year’s, finding myself in a bathtub at my dad’s house, trying to die on New Year’s Eve.  Does it give me any insight into why I disappeared?  Unfortunately not.  It’s interesting though…

3:44 am, Tuesday December 27, 2005

A rant.

The children are sleeping all safe in their beds and I’m sitting here paralyzed because I cannot figure out how to turn on my iRiver mp3 player.

I press the button that says “power” at least a hundred times.

I read the troubleshooting manual at least ten times.

I give up.  I want to break the little metal gadget into a thousand pieces using a hammer and a little adrenaline.

But of course one cannot do this, for it would render the tiny harddrive unreturnable.

So I sit here and loathe technology and loathe myself for being so incapable.

I sit here and think fondly of bed, but have no desire to lie down.

I am a bad person.

Not bad in the traditional sense.  I don’t throw garbage out into the streets, I vote, social injustices have brought me to tears, I’ve turned off the TV.

No, I am bad in a much subtler way.  I don’t care about myself as much as others care for me.  And I don’t care for you nearly as much as you care for me.

Not to say you wouldn’t have found yourself in the same predicament, anxious to explore the far reaches of your mind after an afternoon of shopping that was supposed to provide some sense of satisfaction, but instead made you embarassed, embarassed to show anyone how many clothes you’d bought and how nicely they would match your iRiver as you walk towards a seat on the bus.

Money.  Is evil, makes the world go round, is the root of all evil, is necessary.  I cringe thinking of future dealings I will be forced to have with this reified symbol of value.  I cringe thinking of the sixty-six dollars I will have to ask my father for tomorrow, my weekly allowance from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority.  Did I mention I’m insane?  I cringe thinking of meetings at banks, maximum-growth savings accounts, GICs, RRSPs.  I want out but out is not an option.  I was born into this system, and by this system I will die.

I suppose the mention of insanity perked up your ears or your eyes or whatever sense organ you are absorbing this rant through.  Only 20% of psychiatrists agree with each other on a given diagnosis.  So I’ve been given a number of trophies for my deviation from sanity.  Borderline personality disorder, anxiety disorder, major depression, bipolar disorder, schizotypal disorder, obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

I agree with each of these diagnoses.  They reference pages in the bible of psychiatry upon which descriptions of the various “disorders” are given.  And each of those pages describes me to a T.  I’m even getting a study grant from the government because of my madnesses, and would encourage you to step up to the plate – you never know what seemingly insignificant idiosyncracy could earn you a couple grand in grants or bursaries.

Embrace your neuroses!  Make love to your psychoses!  Then turn around and quietly laugh at that man on the bus with untied shoelaces who is having a loud conversation, with himself.

Functional-crazy.  That’s what it’s all about.

You put your left hand in, you pull your left hand out, you put your left hand in and you shake it all about.  Do you know who you’re voting for this January?

You’re about to be exposed to one belief I hold that may offend you: democracy doesn’t work.

Most of us won’t be voting for anyone, as we know which neighbourhoods corresspond with certain political parties.  Those of us who do vote will not vote for the candidate we like the most, but for the candidate we loathe the least.  Stephen Harper looks like an alien from planet G94/B, Paul Martin looks like he’s had an eyebrow lift, Jack Lleyton is a smaller man with a mustache.  And then there are those crazy separatistes in Quebec.  Looks like Mr. I Can’t Stop Opening my Eyes this Wide will win.

4:17 am now.  I have a vast array of tranquilizers and downers that could put me fast to sleep but I leave them on the shelf.

I refuse to sleep until this iRiver turns on.

I refuse to eat until I am unhealthy looking, a look I pull off well.

In high school the cold, veiny hands of a girl with bad circulation were endearingly termed, “Jen hands”.

And you expect me to be a good person?

To watch the evening news, to take it seriously?  To take economics or commerce or business because I will surely find my dream job within one of those disciplines?  To refuse Joe the dealer, when he shows up at my doorstep with his kool-aid green hair flying in all directions?

I’d rather be sent to the principal’s office, just one more time.  For laughing too hard or crying too hard, for distracting the teacher or distracting my peers, for yelling too loud or refusing to speak.  I would sit in that principal’s waiting area, palms sweaty, eyes darting around, stomach acid churning.  A disappointed glance and a call home to mom and dad.  Same thing every time, so why do I still get nervous?

The worst punishment I ever endured was a few days off school during which I drove around the city with my ne’er do well friends and smoked drugs.  Of course, I was thinking about the implications of my actions the whole time.  The implications were – nothing!  I was just a certain woman or man’s favourite underling to make an example of.  Arsonist, smoker, junkie, counterfeit artist, vandal, stoner, scrapper – just like those pages of the psychiatrist’s bible, I could be described by many unsavoury terms.  Now look what will happen to you if you venture out into that territory.

4:32.  Time goes fast for a little while and then slows back down, sometimes so much that it seems the clock is ticking backwards.  Right now it proceeds at a normal speed, simply stating the strange hour that is upon me, reminding me that good citizens will be getting up for their morning runs in one hour, reminding me that I stopped going to bed at a reasonable hour almost a decade ago.  It never mattered anyways.  I would always be exhausted in the morning, whether I’d had eight or three hours of sleep.  What difference does it make?  Does it make you nervous to imagine writing that final exam after only three hours of sleep?  Well then you probably won’t do very well, being so nervous and all.

4:37.  It sounds like a flight – flight 437 from Vancouver to Winnipeg, from Tokyo to Vancouver, from Melbourne to Tokyo, then back again.  My father spent six months in Europe when he was my age and has sworn off travelling since.  I guess he was disillusioned somehow.  Whenever I’ve travelled I’ve departed this strip-mall sea of a city with absolutely no expectations, so I’ve always had a great time, too great, I’ve always wanted never to return home, where things are like this, where things are just so.

4:41 and I can feel the bags forming underneath my eyes, but it doesn’t matter because in my bag I have M.A.C. hyperreal foundation 300 and a tube of mascara that could make your heart break.  I can look beautiful falling apart, like the ruins of Babylon or something like that, that likening myself to shows my heinousness.

I’ve been careful lately to apply eye-liner and lipstick.  Doing little things like putting on make-up make us feel better about ourselves.  Take care of yourself.  I never was too good at that, but I’m getting better, says #240 “pink freeze” eyeshadow.  I’m getting better.

Better enough to go to school in less than ten days.  I wish I could tell you that I have my notebooks ready, my books purchased, my schedule memorized.  I wish that were me but it is not.  I won’t know what time my first class is until the day of, and I’ll shove some lined paper into a bag, and miss the first bus because I’m looking for a pen.  And I’ll get through the work, get top marks, clinging on to success with the tips of my fingers, looking down at failure and wishing I could just let myself drop into the abyss of not caring.  I pretend not to care but that’s an easy one – you know I care, if I didn’t maybe I would have gotten through registration day without crying.

Bureaucracy makes me ill.  Vomiting would have been more a propos than crying, but I’m a slave to my body’s involuntary reactions.  I haven’t been able to vomit for a long time.  Even when I’ve been deathly ill I’ve still had to force it out, sticking two fingers down my esophagus.  I miss being able to puke without such prodding.

New Year’s Eve is in four days.  It always messes me up to think about where I was last New Year’s and where I am now.  It’s one of those few times you have two clear reference points and can trace how one year influenced the next year, but in so many more ways than you could have imagined.  At the same time you can view what was so very important to you one year means nothing to you now.  Don’t shed a tear, I’m not trying to be sentimental, fuck, anything but sentimental, I’m only looking at the start from the finish line.  Out of breath and wild-eyed.  Heaving.

I never won a race and I quit every type of lesson I embarked upon before the third session, so I was never given ribbons or trophies of any sort.  I received the highest mark in my grade almost every year, so I was given a certificate and a scholarship.  But academics aren’t like sports or boy scouts or camp, no one stands cheering you on, and no one hears your name for it is said quietly, it is not yelled.

I would prefer for my name to be said quietly though.  Yelling is loud and tacky, especially when he or she who yells feels it necessary to add on a bunch of syllables to the name they shout.  Like ______________ _________.  That’s not my name.  My name is ___.  I was born in the eighties and my parents were unoriginal.

5:04 am.  Winter provides me with soothing darkness at this earlyist of hours.  But the days are already growing longer, a little longer each day until the light at 5:04 am is blinding.  Not tonight.  Tonight I may lay under the covers after taking a cocktail of pills and feel quite safe.

My favourite instant is that when you turn out the last lamp and for a few seconds there is only blackness.  Quickly things take back their form and place, but for an instant they didn’t exist.  I didn’t exist.  No, that’s wrong, if I didn’t exist there would be no blackness.

5:09 am.  I wonder how much longer I could keep typing for.  I wonder when it would stop making sense, or if it already has.  I wonder what tomorrow will bring, probably nothing worth speaking of in a week.  I should really take the pills I was supposed to take almost twelve hours ago now, the chemicals that make me sleep.

Lately it’s hardly sleep though, just nightmares and waking up in cold sweats.  Nightmares that Josh is still here, that you said ‘no’, that I forgot the wrong thing at the wrong time and thus will cease to live.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this last night of casting off random words and thoughts into the void.  Of course I’ve learned nothing, of course I’m not done yet.  But done is being forced upon me by the concerned citizens close to me, and we never really learn, we are just given ideas to ponder in the hope that maybe, just maybe, someday we’ll come up with one of our own.

Clocks are tripe, time is meaningless.  Good luck convincing them of that one.  Just take your pills, five down the hatch and one up the ol’ nose.  How I do enjoy sucking foreign substances up into my nostrils through a straw-type instrument.  How far we are apart from one another, how much you will never understand about me, how much I will never understand about you.  How close we are to one another, trudging through the same snow, walking over that same path day after day.  And I don’t even know your name.  One of my biggest problems is that I don’t know how or when to stop.  When funny’s become absurd, when philosophy’s become a rant, when a rant’s become an evening and the evening’s almost over.

How could I ever have a family, children of my own?  How could I raise them, seeing the chaos that underlines each second of our being?  I gather I could do quite well, but I would never be called a good mother.  The good mothers would feel little shocks of superiority every time I walked past and gave them an opportunity to sneer.  Bad bad bad.

If bad and good are really all we’re made of, I’ve got something else coming to me.  But fuck, I may take drugs from strangers and dance the night away instead of studying, but I walk to school and I don’t go to Starbucks and I don’t even have TV.

I suppose good is the norm, and the norm always tends towards mediocrity.  I suppose bad is the unknown, and the unknown is not governed by the rules of statistics.  The unknown is all we have.  No, we don’t have time, and we hardly have space.  We don’t know.  I don’t know.  You don’t know.  Nobody knows.

And that makes life worth a little more.  Each answer is echoed by a new question, and that makes us infinite.  Infinite ugliness, infinite beauty, infinite sound and infinite light.  I only wish I could know how the story ends.

I suppose it ends happily ever after.

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Posted in Bipolar, Poetry, Prose, Personal

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Sensationalism vs. Sensationalism: “Psychaitry: An Industry of Death” film + review

Posted on March 26, 2010 by | 4 Comments

Last night, after finally getting some pain relief, Alaryyk and I watched the documentary I posted here a few days back, “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death”.

The narrator of the film sounded like an announcer at a “monster truck” event.  The captions looked like those from an episode of “24″ (I’ve never watched this show myself, but I’ve seen the commercials) or some other “terrorism/CIA”-related North American primetime drama.  I have to add the “North” to “American”, because sadly, Canada now has a show of this genre.  At least knowing the record of success that CRTC funded Canadian TV programming has had, it will be off the air by the end of the month. :lol:

The statistics provided were outlandish both in their presentation and their lack of any reference as to where they had come from.  Numbers of billions of dollars spent on the “Industry of Death” flash across the screen, as do numbers of deaths of psychiatric patients, which I can say from a well-researched perspective, were exaggerated.

However, many of my favourite theorists from the field of the Sociology of Medicine and Psychiatry were interviewed, albeit in 30 second clips, including Andrew Scull – author of the fantastic book Making Us Crazy, Robert Whitaker – author of the fabulous historical book Mad in America, and Thomas Szasz – the psychiatrist and author of a canon of critical books such as The Myth of Mental Illness and The Medicalization of Everyday Life. As Benjamin Rush is to “The Father of Psychiatry”, Thomas Szasz is to “The Father of Anti-Psychiatry”.  But I don’t think that analogy will be appearing on any standardized exams anytime soon.

The history of madness presented in the documentary is completely accurate, but the narrator’s voice was incredibly distracting, as were flashing red and black screens of the aforementioned numerical figures.

Thus, I can see why those familiar with this history could be quite peeved with the style of the film – I was.  But it got me thinking… the documentary imitated the “infotainment” genre that characterizes the evening news, and the self-proclaimed “documentaries” presented on television, from Dog, the Bounty Hunter to Dateline to the bizarre MSNBC programs that are supposed to depict the reality of supermax prisons in the United States – I recall one called Lockdown (having worked at a jail, and after studying prisons for a year, I found these much more irresponsible, as the images depicted were absolutely not reflective of reality).

But is the only way to fight back against sensationalism to use sensationalism to present your own message?  If “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death” were shown on television, would it attract and educate more viewers than a more “toned down” documentary about the history of “madness”, the abuse of psychiatric patients, and the number of people that develop permanent tardive dyskenisa (presents similarly to Parkinson’s Disease) or die each year as a result of taking psychiatric drugs/being subjected to ECT?  Would the general public find the information more or less believable?

The answer is – I have no idea.  I am turned off by sensationalist television myself, but apparently, the majority of North Americans are not.

Incredibly important footage that the public needs to be exposed to – such as the drugging of Russian communist dissenters with antipsychotic/neruoleptic drugs, to disable the parts of their brains responsible for “critical and lofty thoughts” – is included.

In sum, the film was completely accurate in its historical depiction of psychiatry and some of the most important scholars in this field of sociology were introduced, but the statistics seemed (and some definitely were) very exaggerated, and the narrator’s commanding tone, which could also be compared to that of Robert Stack, the original narrator of Unsolved Mysteries, and constant flashes of bright light made it reminiscent of a conspiratorial show about UFOs.

So would this cause the public to think it was complete conspiracy?  Or is this type of presentation very seductive to some, making them change their minds about things they previously didn’t believe in, or were unaware of?

Can false sensationalism be successfully counteracted by “less false” sensationalism?

I would love to hear your opinion on this, as it has spurred new questions that I’m grappling with.  I will repost it, and hopefully initiate some discussion!  You don’t necessarily need to watch the whole thing – watching the first twenty minutes will give you an impression of the style used throughout.

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Posted in Documentaries, Mad Society

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Haunted or Hearing Voices?

Posted on March 7, 2010 by | 2 Comments

The absolute worst period of my struggle with psychiatry, and my struggle with my self, took place during the summer of my 21st year.  The psychiatrist that had me check in once a month for 5 minutes was prescribing me 600mg of Effexor, 1200mg of Lithium, and 600mg of Seroquel, the Seroquel later replaced by a prescription for a “random” amount of Trazodone (the bottle said “take one to three pills” at bedtime).  Oh, plus a bunch of Clonazepam and Lorazepam – at this point we can just assume that benzos are always a part of my prescribed diet ;)

I lived at my Father’s house for a month after I was released from the ward (hospitalization #3), and was so depressed that for an entire month I stayed in bed.  I had a large bottle of 25mg Seroquel pills, leftover from some other prescription, that I kept in my bedside drawer, and each time I woke up I would take another pill and fall back into nothingness – I say nothingness because the unconscious state that antipsychotics put you into cannot be called “sleep”, as it does not involve dreaming or waking up feeling anything close to “well rested”.  When dad said to me, “Do you think the hospital would be a better place for you right now?”, it was time to leave.  I entered a month-to-month tenancy with Evan*.  He had just lost his job because of his drug use and was in the process of trying to obtain Employment Insurance, and I was on Social Assistance (of the “disability” variety, meaning I got some extra bus tickets when I needed to see a doctor, as well as about another $40/mth more than other non-disabled recipients.  Oh boy!).

So we couldn’t afford much.  We ended up living in a ground floor suite in a very old building on Sherbrook St. in Winnipeg’s “West End”, quite far north of Portage Ave.  In Winnipeg, Portage Ave. is the dividing line between rich and poor, white and First Nations.  Of course there are some exceptions, but living “north of Portage”, the further north the worse, is generally seen as the mark of having failed at life somehow.

The suite was replete with bars on the windows, a distinct lack of hot water, and many little mouse friends (and their “droppings”;).  At this point, I had definitely not been “compliant” in regard to taking the massive quantity of pills as prescribed.  I would take some Effexor or some Lithium at random every other day or so.  For about a week I did take the prescribed daily dosage of Lithium, but found that it slowed my brain down so much that I felt I was nearing brain death.  Our food diet definitely was not “healthy” by any stretch of the imagination, consisting of whatever items we managed to steal from the Safeway store at the end of the block.  I remember there being lots of popsicles.

And then the voices.  I had never “heard voices” before, and of course thought it meant that I was losing my mind completely, and that it would soon be lost forever.  As Evan slept I laid awake all night listening to a crowd conversing, although I could not make out any words.  The conversation always seemed to be “coming from” the wall on one side of the apartment.  I knew it “wasn’t real” but I couldn’t stop the noise.

This continued for some time before I started hearing a little girl’s voice at night, not coming from the wall, but crying into my right ear, “Daddy!”  I tried to psychoanalyze myself, not getting any help from the psychiatrist, and thought that perhaps it reflected the negative feelings I had about my own “Daddy” at the time, and that somewhere inside me there was a little girl calling out to her dad for help.

Then came the chanting, singing, and drumming, which I could not relate to any personal experience.  I had never listened to traditional Canadian First Nations’ music, but again these were the voices of children.  I felt like the sound was coming from an area in the living room near the television set, and often had to restrain myself from smashing the TV with a bat.

Evan was not all too concerned with these “voices” that I was hearing, and I was scared out of my mind.  Then, on a Friday night in September after attempting to go back to university, I was sitting on the couch in the living room and looked at the hardwood floor beneath me.  I saw something, for a split second, that I had not seen since I had lain in a coma that February (a result of the seizure my doc prescribed, which I’ve written about in previous posts).  It had something to do with the cycle of life, with birth and death and the Universe, and I wanted to figure it out.

Unfortunately, my visual revelation was apparently accompanied by “a crazy look in my eyes” :shock: that no one could stand.  I started to believe that I was dead again, and that Evan and anyone else I came into contact with was “carrying on a charade to convince me I was still alive”.  Thus, all of my energy was focused on trying to stop “acting/looking crazy” – I did not think about the vision again.  When Evan returned home about a week later with a crackpipe, and I immediately snatched it from his hand and smashed it against a wall, he was furious.  I decided it was time to leave this place, wherever I was, dead or alive.  I decided I would do this by taking a handful of Lithium pills, which ended in 5 days of blood dialysis and my fourth hospitalization at the psych ward.  By the time I reached the ward, my eyes evidently no longer emitted this “crazy look” that disturbed others so much.  I never went back to the apartment – my dad helped out by fetching the few things I had there before I was released (the furniture had all been Evan’s).

While in the hospital, I was put on the antipsychotic Clozapine, which is hardly ever prescribed because of the potential for very serious side-effects, the worst being a low white blood cell count that could render a sinus infection deadly.  For the two years that I was on this drug I had to go for bi-weekly blood tests.  It turned me into a drone, and perhaps that was what I needed to finish my B.A. degree.

But when I realized I would not complete my Honour’s Thesis on time if I kept taking Clozapine, which caused me to sleep for 15 hours if no alarm clock was set – again, when waking up from antipsychotic-induced sleep I did not feel at all rested – and made the choice to research how one is to taper off the drug and go about this myself, knowing that my psychopharmaceutical-loving psychiatrist would not be impressed with my decision to drop a med from my cocktail.  In the days after I took the last pill, I had the same vision.  However this time I was able to think about it without being afraid, and the “manic” period of sleeplessness and creativity that ensued resulted in an award for Best Thesis at my graduation :)

I now understand what the vision meant, although it is nearly impossible for me to try to describe it, using language, as it belonged to a realm where there are no such things as words.

I also started thinking more critically about the summer spent “hearing voices”, and spoke to a close friend and fellow psychiatric survivor about that time period.  She suggested that they may not have been “voices”, in the psychiatric sense (projecting one’s own consciousness and believing that one’s own inner voice belongs to someone else who is talking to them, ex/ telling them to do things such as hurt oneself), but the voices of spirits.

It was true that I had only heard the voices in that one space, the apartment on Sherbrook St.  The area had a huge history of social upheaval concerning Canada’s First Nations Peoples, when they were shipped off reserves and into the city.  I’m sure many little girls shouted for their Daddies on the ground where that apartment block stood, and the chanting and singing I heard was distinctively in the style of traditional Native Canadian ceremonial music, which I had not been listening to or thinking of – indeed, I had never heard this type of music before, but I knew what it was when I heard it.

Call me crazy, but I now find my experience with the “voices” easier to explain in terms of the “paranormal” than in psychiatric terms.  Yes, I believe that the spirits of this country’s ancestral children were singing to me, and that their intentions were absolutely benevolent – possibly that they were trying to heal me or sing me to sleep.  I do not believe that non-compliance with my medication regime was responsible, although perhaps there is a possibility that the chemicals in my brain that were being fucked with, when I took the pills on an irregular basis, allowed me to tap into some other plane of reality, just as naturally occurring, organic psychotropics, like the Ayahuasca that Alaryyk and I were going to experiment with Peru, enable extra-sensory perceptions, including aural and visual phenomena.

I have never again “heard voices”.

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Posted in Effexor is Evil, Meds, Meds, Meds!, Poetry, Prose, Personal

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“Letters of Complaint: The Art of Getting What You Deserve as a Human Being” – Letter #4

Posted on February 27, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Perhaps my all-time favourite, written to the director of health services at my University’s “health clinic”…

Dear _______ ______,

Subject: Formal Complaint (re: Dr. Basson) and Appeal of Fine

I am writing this letter to bring to your attention the unprofessional, condescending, and outright disturbing psychiatric treatment I was subject to under the care of the psychiatrist employed by __________’s Health and Counselling Services, Dr. Basson.

Before outlining the reasons for this complaint, I would like to compliment the other doctors and counsellors that I have had the pleasure of meeting and working with at the Centre.  Thus, Dr. Basson’s conduct seems greatly at odds with the attitudes of these other professionals, the general atmosphere, and goals of the Clinic that I have perceived to be very positive and progressive.

I have been a psychiatric patient for seven years, my formal diagnosis being “Bipolar I Disorder”, and have been prescribed over twenty different psychopharmaceuticals during this time, thus I am quite knowledgeable about the effects, some positive and some extremely negative, that these drugs have had on my body and mind.  During our first meeting, I informed Dr. Basson that I have taken four different antipsychotics, all of which caused me to become extremely lethargic, despondent, and unable to function at a level sufficient to pursue my academic career.  I also let her know that the mood stabilizer, Lithium, caused similar side-effects, as well as putting me into renal failure, requiring me to spend five days on blood dialysis at age 21.

Upon giving her this information about my medical history, she told me that as a physician, she would grant me control over my current and future decisions regarding medication.  However, during our next several appointments, this promise was severely broken.  When I told her that the sleeping medication that she was prescribing me was not allowing me to rest, but instead agitating me, and suggested a different drug that allowed me to sleep well in the past, she gave me the following ultimatum: ‘I will absolutely not prescribe any other medication than Chlorpromazine (the oldest of antipsychotics and that with the most clinical documentation of adverse and often permanent side-effects) for your problems with sleep.  If you make such a suggestion again, I will cut you off all of your medication.’  If I were to stop taking the three medications which have successfully stabilized my condition over the past three years, I would no doubt be spending the next year in a hospital, rather than completing my M.A. Thesis.

I attended two more appointments with Dr. Basson, at which times she continued to promote Chlorpromazine, as well as adamantly promoting Lithium.  At the end of each appointment she insisted that I spend the following week seriously considering going back on the medication that caused me to go into renal failure, without any apparent intention of evaluating my current kidney function.

These recommendations and threats were very traumatic.  I have been a psychiatric patient for a longer period of time than Dr. Basson has been practicing psychiatry, and I know how these medications affect me.  After discussing her comments and ultimatums with friends, many of whom also have in the past or continue to see psychiatrists; as well as family members who were witness to the bodily harm the medications she continued to promote caused me in the past, my suspicions that I was not receiving professional, respectful, or conscientious treatment were confirmed.

Therefore, after a long night spent ruminating about her conduct with those close to me, I decided not to attend my scheduled appointment with her the following morning, Thursday August, 27th, feeling it would be traumatic and fruitless, and would undoubtedly involve more irresponsible propositions and threats regarding medication.

Thus, I was fined $100.00 for missing the appointment.  In conclusion, I would like to appeal this fine.  Rather than subjecting myself to Dr. Basson’s treatment, I made an appointment with my wonderful G.P. at the clinic, Dr. Ranger, who made the change to my sleeping medication that I had initially suggested.  Since then I have been mentally and physically healthy and stable, productive, and feel confident and prepared to complete my M.A. in preparation to continue my studies at the Ph.D. level.

I thank you for your time, consideration of the erasure of the fine, and evaluation of Dr. Basson’s clinical conduct.

Sincerely,

______ _______

(followed by list of “positions” I hold at the University for good measure ;) )

Result:  A formal letter of apology from the director, and the alleviation of the fee.  But even better, the letter was forwarded to all staff at the clinic (from physicians to desk clerks).  I am happy to say that Dr. Basson is no longer employed by the University I attend :)

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Posted in Psychiatrists, Scars' Letters of Complaint

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From “RateMDs.com”…amusing reviews of psychiatrists I’ve seen in the past:

Posted on January 31, 2010 by | Leave a comment

First one I ever saw, along with my ex-ex-ex-partner/serial sexual offender, Dr. Stewart Wakeman (Winnipeg, MB):

1. Avoid this doctor. He is hostile and has his own issues to work through. His approach is both unconventional and unprofessional. For instance, he yelled at me during our first session, which is unacceptable on two levels. One, he didn’t know me well enough to find such fault with me. Two, a doctor should never yell at a patient, unless perhaps the doctor is in some sort of physical danger. Since that wasn’t the case, his hostility was not only unproductive but destructive. From my perspective, it seems this doctor is struggling with his own emotional issues, which are negatively impacting his therapy practice. A doctor’s office should be a safe place to learn and grow. It should never be a place of abuse. For this reason, I strongly recommend avoiding Dr. Wakeman.

2. tries hard sometime, but sometimes is not a good trait when dealing with mental health.becomes timid quite easily.much better suited for female patients who he feels less intimidating.and is difficult to hear that he cant do anything and he never has, because there are alot of resources out there in which he is not aware.it is a shame because at one point there was a good modality but when you breach confidelity more than once the trust kinda goes out the window.

Personal Reflection:  This psychiatrist was far more interested in converting me to Christianity than improving my “mental health”…or perhaps he thought that would do the job.  He failed to pick up on the fact that I was being abused by my partner.  He also called me “sweetie” when my ex was not in attendance…just a little unprofessional.  Unless you are looking for a preacher/psychiatrist, I would agree that this man should be avoided.

Dr. A. Kettner – in charge of the “STAT” program at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg, MB.  While the other docs on this short list have some positive comments posted about them on the ratemds site, hers’ are strictly of the negative ( :( ) variety…

1. Wow, what can I say. This woman needed help far more than I did when I saw her. She repeatedly would give me an appointment card and when I’d show up for the appointment, she’d act like I didn’t have one!!! Then, when she would open her appointment book, there it would be except she had tried to erase it! I could never figure it out. Bizarre, stay away, stay away.

2. Avoid this physician at all costs. I found Dr. Kettner to extremely rigid in her opinions & very hasty in arriving at a questionable diagnosis. Once she’s “categorized” you, there is no way to sway her opinion: she does not like to be questioned on how she arrived at her diagnosis, and especially does not like it if the patient questions the effectiveness of the drug(s) she puts you on. She seems to get especially annoyed if you question the safety of a psychiatric medication: unlike other physicians who I’ve found to be quite willing to discuss pros and cons of meds, especially risk versus potential benefits, Dr. Kettner seems to take it as a personal insult if you question the drugs that she says you “need”. If you enter into any conversation along these lines she will cut the appt short. She also seems disinterested in any form ofpsychotherapy: prescribing meds & sending you on your way seems to be her modus operandi. Honestly, avoid this doctor & get a different referral, I did.

Personal Reflection: This woman is dangerous.  She kept raising the dosage of an antidepressant that was not working, and added on a bunch of atypical antipsychotics when that didn’t do the job.  Those didn’t do the job either, and I soon ended up as an inpatient.  She also recommended that my Stepmother have ECT when a variety of meds hadn’t improved her depression after losing her son in a car crash.  Dangerous, and a real bitch at that.

Dr. A.J. DeRocquigny, the psychiatrist I saw during and after my hospitalizations – i.e. for many long years… (Winnipeg, MB)

1. He has way too many patients; he gives out drugs like it is halloween.

2. His idea of treatment for psychiatric conditions is medication. Whenever I had a symptom, he prescribed another drug. He never dealt with the issues behind the symptoms and didn’t seem to bother with any type of treatment that didn’t involve drugs (talk therapy, ect.). When I finally stopped seeing him I was on over 7 different types of pills a day, taken throughout the day which amounted to over 30 pills per day. At one point he started prescribing pills to counteract the side effects of other pills. Since I have stopped seeing him I have gotten off of all the meds and have dealt with the underlying issues that were contributing to my mental illness. I DO NOT recommend this dr.

Personal Comment: Yes, that pretty much sums it up.  If you want to walk out of a psychiatrist’s office with a prescription for 10 new medications, prescribed by an old guy who has no idea how they interact with one another, you must see “Dr. D.”  If you want off-label prescriptions for 900mg Effexor, 1200mg Seroquel, etc (i.e. dosages that have NEVER been tested on any human population…aside from his patients I suppose…;) this is your guy.  If you desire a doctor that has no record of the medications you are on, requiring you to tell him what to prescribe each time you see him for one of his famous 5 minute appointments, you must see him at once.  Unlimited lorazepam!  Indeed, with Dr. D., every day is Halloween.

Dr. D. Basson (Vancouver/Burnaby, BC)

For some reason this doctor is mysteriously missing for the site’s archive of doctors.  If I were her, I would be in hiding as well.  She threatened to take me off all of my current meds, a week before I was due to start grad school, if I did not start her regimen of CHLORPROMAZINE (the oldest and most side-effect ridden antipsychotic in existence; causes tardive dyskinesia, etc.) – she told me “it would glue me together” – and Lithium, which previously put me in renal failure, without doing any tests on the current functioning of my kidneys.  She is the psychiatrist on staff at my University, or at least she was until I wrote a letter to the director of health services there…I don’t know what the results were but the letter was forwarded to all other docs/counsellors/staff at the clinic, some of whom warned me of her “methods” before I stepped into her office.  She also considers “having a couple of drinks with friends a few times a week” to be alcoholism, and recommended that I go to rehab for doing so.  I think she views herself as some kind of radical, pulling OLD antipsychotics out of the ol’ compendium, when really she is living in the 1950s if that is her solution to “mental illness”.  Chlorpromazine has pretty much been taken off the market because of its horrible side effects.  Plus, when I told her that the brand name for Chlorpromazine is “Thorazine” (a drug my grandmother took for her entire life after nightmarish experiences with ECT in the 1960s, an attempt to relieve her of her bad memories and panic as a result of being married to an extremely physically abusive alcoholic), she thought it was “Mellaril”.  Nooooo, “Doctor”, two entirely different drugs.  Again, dangerous.  I fear for any patients that take her seriously…

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Physical Pain vs. “Mental Pain”…

Posted on January 25, 2010 by | 2 Comments

Now finding myself in, what I suppose the docs would call “moderate to severe” physical pain, on a daily basis, due to long untreated endometriosis that was masked by atypical antipsychotics (this phenomenon is well documented, and I will provide links to articles later today) the old question of whether or not physical pain or mental anguish is more, shall we say, “unpleasant” arises.

In the past, when I have talked to fellow psychiatric patients/survivors about this “would you rather…”-type query, the answer is almost always a resounding “I would rather be in physical pain.”  After suffering a bout of “depression” during the months of October – December, during which dragging myself off of the couch took all of the willpower and energy I possessed, I think I concur.  But why, exactly, is this the case?  I am no longer depressed.  I fought my way through this difficult period – the first bout of depression I suffered in four years, the last episode being during my last hospitalization after which I naively believed that I would never again be depressed to the point of suicidal ideation – without the help of a psychiatrist or any medication changes, based on the often barely tangible belief that it would be over “someday soon”.  Disillusioned with all psychiatrists I have seen in Vancouver, including a “Mental Health Team”, at a clinic where I would see a different physician depending on the day of the week who knew nothing about my medical history or my life, I have decided to stop the search for a shrink in Vancouver, relying only on my GP to prescribe my psych meds, and myself and the advice of experienced others (not “official” psy-experts, but experts at dealing with these issues themselves) as far as hope to taper off of these medications goes.

I find myself questioning whether the reasons why one type of pain over another is “preferred”, and recounting those months of autumn, my first response is to say that the reasons are primarily sociological.  When I was “depressed”, no physically observable reason why I could not uncurl myself from the fetal position, or make it to my graduate seminars existed.  Those around me, even those having personally experienced “feeling that way”, became extremely frustrated with me.  Calls started pouring in from my Father, who lives 2000 miles away, questioning why I wasn’t answering the phone regularly, and if this was going to affect my academic career or already quite dire financial situation.  I wanted to sleep and sleep, for months, for years, until this passed.  The “depression” arose from life circumstances – a fight with the department of sociology and anthropology at the educational institution I attend over a project I wanted to do regarding the treatment of psych. patients by ER physicians, harassment by my neighbours and landlord, to the point of what I have now termed “psychological terrorism”, the transition of moving to a new city and attending a new school, where I could no longer know what to expect from my peers or professors, and the hospitalization of my partner, who would soon become my fiancée, while in “lock-up”.

I have found that people, in general, are much more sympathetic now that I often find myself back on that couch, in the same position, but crying out because of the pain that radiates from my pelvis to my toes.  My Father, and those around me, are now concerned in a much different way – they are no longer worried about my academic or financial success, but about my suffering. I have a renewed passion for my studies, and speak excitedly of my work, but find myself crying tears of frustration as I am not able to apply myself as much as I want to.  Basically, sympathy abounds.  It is clear that “I am not responsible” for this pain, it is something I cannot do anything about.  I would argue that depression, as well as other “psychiatric symptoms”, are equally uncontrollable, especially when situational factors are the main reasons for those symptoms, but this is not understood by the general public, and that bout of “illness” cost me my teaching job and confidence that the University’s faculty had in me upon admission, while this bout of “illness” has not required me to submit any medical documentation, like the last one did, and has been met by the same professor that fired me with many kind, understanding messages and wishes.

The issue of medication, however, has been a different story.  While physicians have eagerly handed me prescriptions for antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and benzos over the past six years – medications listed by the World Health Organization as highest for potential addiction (the SSRI Paxil being at the very top of this list) – obtaining medication for pain has proved to be a near impossible, and continuously demoralizing, and dare I say, disgusting task.  I don’t know if the fact that I carry a “label” of being “mentally ill”, diagnosed with “bipolar disorder” and on medications purported to treat that diagnosis, causes doctors and pharmacists to immediately jump to the conclusion that I am not suffering from pain, but exhibiting “drug-seeking behaviour”, is or is not a factor.  ”Dual Diagnosis” (psychiatric illness accompanied by an “addiction” to some illegal narcotic) is a very popular concept in psy-circles these days.  As taking anything with tylenol in it now poses serious risk to my liver, after having to take tylenol #3s since age 15 during menstruation, I must take codeine with ibuprofen or naproxen.  The pharmaceutical industry has not created a pill which combines codeine with an anti-inflammatory drug, so I require a prescription for *gasp*…pure codeine.  I was not aware that codeine was classified as a “narcotic” of a higher degree than Tylenol 3, or that that its pure form carried with it the possibility for people to snort it?  Shoot it?  All I want is a painless day, as I have a major presentation to give tonight at school.

In this province, a prescription for pure codeine requires a physician to use a special triplicate pad.  My own GP has no issues with writing this prescription, but she only works a few days a week, and not on the same days each week, so getting a refill from the “doctor on call”, or heaven forbid, a “walk-in clinic” doctor, is nearly impossible – I suppose these physicians fear having to explain to the person who receives one of the triplicate copies why they gave this prescription out?   Ironically, over the weekend, the female GP on call at my own GP’s office refused even to prescribe Tylenol #3s.  I desperately went to a local walk-in clinic in East Vancouver, a “notorious place of residence for those who are addicted to opiates”, and a male doctor wrote me a prescription for T3s.  Although my file at the pharmacy where I pick up my meds is flagged “do not dispense medications containing acetimenophen”, this concern was overlooked when I cashed in the script for enough pills to get me through the day, during which I felt my liver becoming increasingly inflamed.

The original question now becomes more ambiguous after laying out these issues and reactions from others in writing, those of both my nearest and dearest, and medical professionals.  Depression makes me feel guilty – like I should be being productive, but I am not, for “no reason”.  Pain makes me feel frustrated – that I am confined to this body and a slave to it when some part of my physiology is not working quite right.

If I lost an arm, I would be subject to endless pity.  If I fell back into a serious depression, I would be subject to commands to, “buck up already”, or my favourite, oft-quoted by my Father, response that “happiness is a choice”.  If I experienced psychotic mania, as I did in 2005, those around me would be afraid – not so much for me, but of what I might do to others in an unpredictable and potentially (the media perpetuating this stereotype) “dangerous” or “violent” state.

I think the pity would become quite tiresome, but the feeling of being “disabled” – unable to carry out the daily tasks of living, such as eating, doing laundry, going to work, going to school, taking the odd shower, for no other reason that the fact that my mind has trapped me in a state of inertia, ultimately hurts more.

As my mantra and curse is that “my life is my research, my research is my life”, I’m sure this opinion may be subject to change, and I will continue to write about my experiences now that I struggle with a non-psychiatric diagnosis…issues of gender and stigma also apply to this particular condition, but I must leave those for another day, as my academic responsibilities beckon…

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Posted in Poetry, Prose, Personal, Sociology of Medicine

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