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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 7 of 7. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by Gracie2 on December 25, 2002, at 20:49:16
To All-
Near the beginning of December, I posted a long letter to Psycho-Babble about my recovery. While I didn't get a lot of responses, the ones I recieved were heartfelt and gratifying.Tonight, Christmas night, it suddenly occurred to me that when I was at my lowest, every now and then I would sign on to PSB to see how everyone was doing, but I had given up on Psycho-Babble because I was convinced, by that time, that psychiatric medications would never work for me.
I gave up on myself just this last February, and swallowed all of my prescribed medications at once - over 50 pills. I guess I was thinking that I would make these drugs work for me, one way or another.But here I am, still with you, still here to offer you hope. Because I never followed links when I was seriously depressed (too much effort),
I'm just going to rewrite my "recovery letter" and edit where I can, although I probably won't be able to skip much. Here is the letter: I hope you take the time to read it, because I know it will help you. I know it.
* * * *
This website, the other posters on this website and the good Dr Bob: you've been an incredible source of support and advice for me during the last few years, and I want to give back to you all by telling you, through really hard-earned experience, what I've learned about psychiatry and psychiatric medication. I'm well on the road to recovery, I'm doing alright now, and I hope this posting will help others.Without going into a lot of gruesome detail, I was extremely ill for a very long time. I was too sick to know that I was sick, and I battled recovery every step of the way. I hit bottom not once but three times. The first time, the police
were called and they escorted me to the hospital to be committed. The second time, I was admitted to the hospital after I collapsed with seizures after an unintentional overdose. The third time, I had to have my stomach pumped after an intentional overdose, and the doctors told my husband that I might require a respirator to breathe. Fortunately I woke up before that happened, but I didn't feel fortunate. I was pretty unhappy about waking up, alive.So, you know, I was obviously in very bad shape.
Nobody thought I was going to make it, including myself. I had been under psychiatric care since my first admission, but for the next 3 years I continued to roll downhill, picking up speed as I went. There are reasons for the delay in my diagnosis and treatment, and now that I know what those reasons are, I'd like to share them with you.First, I was so confused and horrified by all the things I was doing to myself, I didn't want anyone to know. Including my psychiatrist. Also, I kept screwing around with my prescribed medications, not taking them as directed. I would "adjust" the dosage myself because I was having trouble with side effects. I would skip dosages because I wanted to drink. (While you can drink in moderation while you're taking this medication, you can't take the pills around the same time that you're actually drinking because it will make you sick.) I would insist that my psychiatrist switch medications when they didn't appear to be working, and if he refused I would order my own stuff from the internet.
I was just so sick, my judgement was so poor and my thinking so skewed, I didn't know what I was
doing. After a very long time, I began to adjust somewhat to the medication I was taking, and it was much easier to take the medication as prescribed once the side effects went away. And once I finally started taking the medication like I was supposed to do in the first place, it eventually had a chance to kick in. Good things gradually started to happen - the fog began to lift, my thinking was clearer, every day I was functioning on a higher level. My panic attacks stopped, the insomnia went away, I no longer suffered from bouts of severe depression and mania. I was able to slow way down on the self-medication with recreational drugs and alcohol.
My judgement improved, and I started to take care of myself again.So on my next visit to the psychiatrist I told him, okay, I'm taking the right medicine at the right dosage, my bipolar symptoms are either gone or getting better every day. But something still isn't right. I'm not happy, I still feel like my life sucks. I hate my job, I can't get focused,
I don't care about anything. I don't want to have fun, I don't know what to do with my life.So then the good doctor added an SSRI to my medication. By this time I was more familiar with how psychiatric medication operates in your brain, so I didn't expect immediate results and I tried not to worry about the side effects. Low and behold, after taking the anti-depressant exactly as directed for some weeks, improvement
became steady. At first, it was just a matter of not being quite so hard to get out of bed in the morning and do the things I needed to do to get through the day. Then, I started to get a little more organized so that my environment wasn't all mess and chaos. Then, I started doing things like setting appropriate goals for myself, stuff like that. Now, I'm trying to pick up the pieces of my life, all the damage I caused to other people with all my crazy bullshit. Probably most gratifying for me is the mirror image of recovery in my only child, Jake, who has been the love of my life since the day he was born. He is 21 now, still living at home, and I see now that this is because of me. Although he's had the resources and, I'm sure, the wish to move out for quite awhile now, he was unable to leave home while I was still in self-destruct mode. Now that he knows he doesn't have to worry about me anymore,
he is so much more relaxed and happy, and able to concentrate on plans for his future.
* * *
Well, I can't finish this tonight because I am late for a party. Imagine that. I haven't been to a party in many years, I had no wish to go and would have handled it poorly if I did go. Now, I believe I can not only handle it, I might even have, well....fun.I'll finish the letter tomorrow. Merry Christmas to all of you, and God bless us every one.
-Gracie
Posted by Tabitha on December 25, 2002, at 22:00:06
In reply to A Christmas gift for you, my friends, posted by Gracie2 on December 25, 2002, at 20:49:16
Gracie, congratulations on all your successes. I've done many of the same things you've described in your process of accepting & learning to cope with your illness. I doubt that many folks just get diagnosed, take pills, and get better right away. At least if there are any who do, then I envy them. It's a long trip, isn't it? You deserve to be proud of all you've accomplished.
And thanks for the inspirational post.
Posted by daizy on December 26, 2002, at 10:13:48
In reply to A Christmas gift for you, my friends, posted by Gracie2 on December 25, 2002, at 20:49:16
Well done you! Its nice to hear a success story it gives us all hope!
Posted by Gracie2 on December 26, 2002, at 17:44:26
In reply to A Christmas gift for you, my friends, posted by Gracie2 on December 25, 2002, at 20:49:16
This is the second half of my "recovery" letter:
So, by the grace of God, I'm somehow still here among the living, and if I can help anybody by sharing the following information with you all, then maybe I can help put back into the world a little of the cosmic good that saved my life.
If you want to take full advantage of psychiatry and psychiatric medications to help yourself get better, you have to follow a few hardcore rules:
1.) Even if your GP is willing to dispense psychiatric medication, don't go that route. While your family doctor is probably aware of how and why these drugs work, he isn't an expert. (Please substitute "she" where appropriate in the dialogue.) The effects of psychiatric medication need to be monitered by an experienced psychiatrist at intervals determined by your psychiatrist.
2.) There are a couple of huge mental barriers that you have to cross to develop a good working relationship with your psychiatrist. The first one is, you have to admit to yourself that you could probably use some psychiatric help. Nobody on earth wants to need medication to function, but if you want to get better, there it is.
The second barrier is, you have to be honest with your psychiatrist, which means that you have to go in there and admit to things that you're not particularly proud of to a virtual stranger. But you can't think of it in that way. The guy is not a priest and he's not a friend, he's a doctor. He's not there to judge you on a moral basis and even if he did, an experienced psychiatrist has seen more crazy crap than you could ever dream up, the things that people do to themselves and each other. So as far as he's concerned, there's nothing new underneath the sun. When you go in there and tell him, "Well I'm not feeling too good right now because last week I drank an entire bottle of vodka in one night, I went out to a bar and picked up 3 guys and brought them home and we all had sex, and then I felt so rotten after they left that I beat my kid...", when you tell him those things, what you are doing is describing your symptoms to a physician.
He makes an educated guess about why you're acting in this manner, and prescribes or adjusts your medication in order to help you start feeling better and stop doing those things to yourself. But he's not a mind-reader, and he can't prescribe the best medication at the best dosage for you, personally, unless he's getting the whole story.Most people are surprised when a psychiatrist usually doesn't say things like, "Well, why do you think you did those things?" because that's analysis. If you want analysis, that's a different matter. A lot of upset people combine medication with analysis, but I never wanted analysis myself so I can't offer much information on that subject. If you think you might benefit from analysis, your psychiatrist can give you information.
3.) Once you've been prescribed medication, if you want it to work, you must stay the course. You can't screw around with it and if you do, the results end up being anywhere from useless to dangerous. So take your pills and take them as directed and keep taking them. Don't run out of medication and don't fool with the dosage yourself, even if you're convinced that you know what you're doing. If you get concerned about side effects, discuss that with your psychiatrist, but don't stop taking your medication without his supervision by quitting "cold turkey" or "tapering", because the consequences can be awful. These are powerful drugs and you have to take them seriously.
4.) Don't lose hope. Psychiatric medications do work. But first, you have to be correctly diagnosed with a specific disorder, and then you have to take a specific drug designed to treat that disorder for a length of time before good things start happening in your brain. Often, other people will start noticing improvement before you do. One of the worst things you can do is to keep switching medications because you want a new medication to work faster. Even if you haven't noticed visible improvement after a few weeks, the drug has been at work in your brain the whole time, lining up the troops in a certain type of formation. If you keep taking the drug, more and more troops keep falling into line and you begin to develop a highly-trained Army. If you stop taking the drug, or fool around with dosage or disregard other directions for taking the drug, good things stop happening in your brain, it all falls apart and you're back to Square One.
Well, that's it. If I can get better, anyone can,
so everybody hang in there.
-Gracie* * *
Update: I always expected that when I got better,
I would return to being my "old self". But my "old self", even when I wasn't depressed, was always kind of emotional and unstable. In the past few weeks, I've been astounded at the changes in myself. Apparently, my whole brain has been completely rewired. I'm doing things now that I have NEVER done. I'm reading and following directions on labels. I'm re-organizing everything in the house because my "old self" would place things anywhere or arrange things to look "pleasing" without regard to how servicible
an arrangement was. Now I'm finding homes for everything and placing items where they will be handy and function the best. And I'm doing all this automatically, without a lot of thought or planning, because it's not necessary. My brain is somehow doing the work for me now without my being aware of it.
Even better, I'm no longer falling apart at the first sign of trouble. It has been my lifelong habit to always expect the very worst in every situation (paranoia, I guess) and once I had convinced myself that this worst-case scenario must be true, I would act accordingly and freak out. Now I'm able to sit down and think through my options, the most important being this: YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH INFORMATION TO MAKE A GOOD DECISION ABOUT THIS, SO JUST SET IT ASIDE FOR RIGHT NOW. This helps me to calm down, and to keep my priorities in line.* * *
It's hard for me to believe now that just 10 months ago, I woke up in ICU connected to an IV, a catheter and a heart moniter, and started to weep because I was still alive. Now I know that, as long as I stay on medication, I will never fall that far again.
Of course, this isn't a fairy tale with a happy-ever-after ending. For many years, my husband and son were subjected to and terrified by all the stupid and dangerous shit I could think up, and they were pretty much traumatized. While my son understands me a lot better than my husband does, and has been able to forgive me because he knows I was sick and completely out of control, my husband is still very angry. It's quite possible that he will be unable to forgive me, and that our 20-year relationship is coming to an end. This is what he's telling me, and I have to deal with and accept that.
The most important thing is that I know I'll be okay, even if my husband walks. I've set up some therapy sessions to help me cope with this, and I've already met my new therapist for evaluation.
She wanted to know what I was most worried about right this minute, whether I was cutting or otherwise intentionally harming myself, or thinking about suicide again. I told her that I was light-years beyond all that, although I still sat down and had a couple of drinks after my husband would say or do something that I thought was cruel. I told her that I wasn't particularly worried about drinking, since my "new brain" has a control valve. When I was sick, I was completely unable to do anything in moderation,
but now I can stop myself.I told my new therapist (who turned out to be a real sweetie) that I was most worried about money.
While I am earning a $100 or so a week by selling used books on amazon.com, and I have a Saturday job at an orthopedic doctor's office, I don't make nearly enough to cover all the bills that my husband is paying for now. I could possibly scrape by on a full-time job as an x-ray technologist, but I am truely afraid that the pressures of a full-time x-ray job would knock me right back into psychosis. Worse, a divorce from my husband could mean the end of my medical insurance, as I'm covered under his plan at work.
I was really frightened that he would disappear,
I'd be kicked out of my house because I couldn't afford the mortgage payments, and that I couldn't afford the psychiatric care and medication that I so desperately need.The therapist asked if I was receiving (I believed she called it) SSI benefits. I didn't know what she was talking about. She said that having bipolar disorder was a definate qualification for receiving social security benefits, and that if my husband took off, I could apply for Medicare coverage. At first I was horrified by the idea. I had enlisted into the Army at the age of 18, was active duty for 7 years, and after being honorably discharged in 1985 I had worked full-time as an x-ray technician
for the next 15 years. I'd never in my life applied for or even considered recieving any kind of government aid, and the idea seemed shameful.
But now I know that if I really need it, financial help is available.
* * *My prayers are with all of you-
Gracie
Posted by shar on December 26, 2002, at 22:10:34
In reply to Re: A Christmas gift for you - Part II, posted by Gracie2 on December 26, 2002, at 17:44:26
Gracie,
I'm so grateful you are still around, and that you gave us this gift. It is, as you said, no fairy tale, rather it is a snapshot of success. (As in, success is the quality of the journey, not the destination.) And, that, as others have said, brings hope.It is heartening to read your story, and when looking at a bleak horizon for days, weeks, months, or years, we can use all the heart we can get.
xoxo
Shar
Posted by shar on December 26, 2002, at 22:31:59
In reply to Re: A Christmas gift for you - Part II, posted by Gracie2 on December 26, 2002, at 17:44:26
This could be so not relevant to you, probably just based on my own fears, but I'm wondering if you have a strategy in mind in case some of your old behaviors crop up?
I can imagine a situation (or maybe I worry about it in my own life) where little bad habits creep in unnoticed, and being swept away. Yep, sounds like my own worries, all right. Still would like to know what you think.
Shar
Posted by Gracie2 on December 27, 2002, at 10:48:24
In reply to But, I wonder.... » Gracie2, posted by shar on December 26, 2002, at 22:31:59
Dear Shar-
No, it's not just you, I know exactly what you're saying. My last psychiatrist and my new psychiatrist keep telling me that I absolutely must quit drinking altogether, and I haven't been able to do that. It's really hard to not drink during the holidays when everyone else is drinking
(I come from a long line of serious drinkers), and it's hard not to drink when I'm upset. Although I do have much more control now, I realize it's foolish to think that my drinking could not get out of hand again.I also still worry too much, especially about this situation with my husband. He keeps telling me to calm down, but it's difficult for me to not be afraid of the future.
One of my all-time favorite movies is "The Wizard of Oz". I think I'll go out and get an Oz poster
and have it framed. I've always had a generous heart and a good brain, even when it was misfiring. Now I need courage.Shar, I'll let you know how it goes and please, let me know how you are too.
-Gracie
This is the end of the thread.
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