So I’m in Raleigh to hear my daughter sing Elijah with the Raleigh Chorus [she’s got the solos] and we meet for coffee this morning. She’s a Clinical Psychologist and she’s talking about an anorexia client of hers she’s mentioned before [a ‘young’ 19 year old]. My daughter says, "She stopped her Prozac and her Concerta on her own and said now she’s stopped having suicidal thoughts and she’s got her appetite back." There’s more, but that part made me wince inside. Later we met her friend for breakfast. Somehow, my profession came up. Later, she was querying me and I could tell there was something she wanted to ask, but was beating around the bush. It was, "don’t a lot of people have trouble getting off those antidepressants, and don’t people get suicidal on those drugs sometimes? I thought they were supposed to help?" Second internal wince. Then my daughter talked about having had trouble finding a Psychiatrist to refer to. Wince again. I’ve learned to not stand on a chair and scream, "I’m not one of those!" But that’s what I feel like doing. And I’ve learned what to say in those circumstances, because they come up all the time. But I really shouldn’t have to be in the situation of having to actually actively not feel defensive of a profession that I chose because it was so challenging, and responding to people who, if they were honest, would ask, "How come you people see patients for fifteen minutes and prescribe them drugs that make them sick?" <\/p>\n
All of this was easily predictable twenty-five or thirty years ago when it all started. Most of you reading this could talk about the coming of Managed Care, and the rise of the less than ethical people in the profession that sold out to PHARMA, and all the corruption that blossomed therafter. But that doesn’t really explain it, it just describes it. The sad thing about what my daughter said is that mainstream psychiatry actually agreed to be a "back-up" profession, backing up the mental health others and primary care physicians who are seeing the patients up front now. But psychiatrists aren’t even being very good "backer uppers."<\/p>\n
I volunteer in a clinic for kids and adolescents [mostly Medicaid insured]. When I first started there, the therapists scheduled them for 15 minutes. I balked. It took them a while to figure out that I actually wanted to take my own history and collaborate in treatment [the name of the clinic is Collaborations]. Now they’re happy about it, but they just weren’t used to that such. They were used to short visits and inevitable meds. Then they had to get used to the idea that I didn’t want to take over the cases as "boss" either. It’s taken two years to get things right – to collaborate. It’s a lot more fun [and productive] for all of us now, but again, getting it that way was like swimming upstream. If I’m going to be a "backer-upper," I’d at least like to be a competent "backer-upper."<\/p>\n
So I’m in Raleigh to hear my daughter sing Elijah with the Raleigh Chorus [she’s got the solos] and we meet for coffee this morning. She’s a Clinical Psychologist and she’s talking about an anorexia client of hers she’s mentioned before [a ‘young’ 19 year old]. My daughter says, "She stopped her Prozac and her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8342"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43504,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8342\/revisions\/43504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}