This Week in Mentalists (25)

It’s Saturday, so let’s look at what has been going on in the rest of the mental health blogosphere.

To nominate a blog for future editions e-mail zarathustra at mentalnurse dot org dot uk

Aethelred the Unread ponders why his psychiatrists chose to discharge him.

I have really struggled to understand why, if he thought medication might still help, he would tell me that I had reached the end of psychiatry. I’ve also struggled to understand why, if he knew of medication that might help me, he would refuse to prescribe it. I’ve come up with three possible explanations. I suppose he might have felt that the therapeutic relationship had completely broken down, and that it was therefore in my best interests to bring it to a close. I didn’t feel that was the case, but I guess he might have done. Another possibility is that he genuinely didn’t believe anti-depressants would ever help me, and his closing comment was just intended to maximise any possible placebo effect if I ever happened to be prescribed them again. My innate pessimism makes me think there may be quite a lot of truth in this explanation.

But in the end I don’t think that’s the most likely reason. The first time I stopped taking the meds he had prescribed, his instinctive reaction was to punish me. Not to investigate why I’d stopped taking the pills, or think about alternative strategies, but to exclude me from all treatment for a period of six weeks. With the second offence, of course, the punishment is always greater, so this time I had to be discharged from treatment altogether. It seems like it was more important to this particular psychiatrist to maintain his position of authority than it was to ensure that I got the help I needed, which, if it’s true, is rather a shame.

The Shrink answers a question from Mental Nurse’s Mr Ian, giving a detailed answer to what constitutes the skill set of a psychiatrist. He summarises as follows:

I don’t think doctors are better than nurses or psychologists. The question posed was what aspects of training gave us noteworthy skills, which is what I’ve waffled on about. This gives a different approach from medics which isn’t necessarily better, it’s just different. Nurses are far far better at many areas of patient care in mental health than I am. Equally, I’d argue medics have strengths that others don’t have. So, as usual, I’m banging on saying medics should do medical stuff, nurses should do nursing stuff, and we can all be happy together.

Mandy Lifeboats Ahoy gives a somewhat skeptical response to The Shrink’s post.

My beef there, as it is here, is that no way can a pscyhiatrist gather much from a 15minute meeting with a patient. Not unless they are a mind reader or have a private investigator out and about following the patient on a daily basis.

Not even the most intuitive of humans could do that, whatever their profession.

And yet these people make decisions about medication, about hospitalisation, about therapy. Big decisions about other people.

Life With Aspergers describes how to date an Aspie.

Many NTs who date aspies complain that the aspie doesn’t know how to do anything by themselves or that they don’t think before they act. In reality, aspies are often so oblivious to unspoken social rules that their partners need to provide them in the form of “aspie rules”.

For example;

1. “Whenever you are asked to go over to someone’s house for dinner, you should bring a wine - or if they’re not alcohol drinkers, some other drink”

2. If you’re visiting someone for lunch, bring a cake

The same sort of rules should be made explicit regarding courtship. These rules include something along the lines of; From a female to a male: “You need to provide one or two compliments to me when we go out; either about my clothes, hair, looks, personality etc.”. Yes, I know that an NT wouldn’t need to be told, but an aspie not only needs telling, they also need it created as a rule.

Seratonin Sister, an occasional commenter on Mental Nurse, has just started up her own blog. This week she has been having to deal with a rude GP.

She wasn’t sympathetic or that helpful especially when I asked to speak with the Crisis Team.Infact her reation was
“What do you think they will do ?”
” They never answer their phones/get back to us when we’ve left an answerphones message” “Psychiatrists don’t work weekends”
“Can’t you wait til Monday”
I did what any other depressed suicidal person would do & slammed the phone down.

In the end, she did manage to get the GP to call the Crisis Team, and received a helpful call from them. (You know, the same Crisis Team who don’t return calls or work weekends…)