Yep, This Week in Mentalists is 40 today, and so will start buying cardigans from Primark and moaning about how music isn’t as good as it used to be. It’s all just loud guitars. No tune to it at all.
To remind us all of our lost youth, we’ll start this week with CAMHS-related bloggers.
To start off, Coloured Mind and Scattered Thoughts considers that maybe the NHS isn’t so bad after all.
What I had lost sight of was the fact that my mental health care has been free, and specialised for my age, and usually the right amount has been given at the right time. I have never been put in hospital when I really didnt need it, nor have I been deprived of care when I was at my worst. I am a student, I have never had to pay for my prescriptions, I have never had to worry about what insurance will cover and what I will have to pay for, all I have needed to focus on is getting better. Sometimes I have wished I lived in the US because then you are the consumer so you can discharge yourself when you wish, and there are shorter waiting lists, and if you don’t like your psychiatrist you can find another one (this is probably all wrong I have never received health care in the US). I trust my psychiatrist, I trust that I am not over medicated. I know he cannot push drugs to make himself richer, or persuade me to have more appointments than I really need. To put it simply I trust him because there is no money involved.
Writing in the Margins of My Mind continues the NHS vs. private healthcare theme:
At the Priory, I was basically told that the NHS wouldn’t take my problems seriously (read: you’re lucky to have us! give us money!), which ultimately turned out not to be true, but I believed it and it scared the hell out of me when it came to needing help again. There have been some subtle comments from CAMHS staff about my notes not being sent from the Priory and the nature of the work I did there and that it hadn’t appeared to have really changed anything, etc. There’s definitely some competition going on. So, here is my very brief breakdown of experiences from each team:
The Cockroach Catcher considers the impact of drug companies on ADHD diagnoses.
I have in my travels met other psychiatrists who often ask why there is such a discrepancy in the diagnosis of ADHD in the US and the rest of the world.
Perhaps it is something they have in the diet. Dietary cause has been popular for a while and we all know the kind of food American kids have.
Perhaps it is the television programmes they watch. Scenes change now every few seconds – used to be every three minutes or so.
Perhaps it is something in their genetic make-up. But the US takes the gene pool from literally every country in the world.
Perhaps they have too many cars. But they took lead out before anybody even consider the harm lead can do.
What about vaccines? Please, we are not going there.
Up until recently American kids consume 90% of the world’s consumption of stimulants although Canada is now taking a bigger share.
The answer may not lie with environmental or genetic factors.
Moving on to the grown-ups, it sounds like Bipolar Mo’s psychiatrist has been visited by the drug companies too.
So an hour later I see the quack and he asks if my wife has filled me in. I confirm that she has and he starts his advertising campaign on the new bipolar miracle cure that is Quetiapine. He raved that recent research showed this was the best medication for bipolar. He actually said “this is the new sun dried tomato”. What the fuck? I’ve never heard that expression before, I guess he means it’s like “is the new black”. I don’t know why he always has to go overboard on things like this when a simple “shall we try this?” or “this could be the right drug for you” would be fine. I’m sure he thinks he has hypnotic powers of persuasion so powerful that he could throw me a dog turd and convince me that eating it would cure me. Then again, I shouldn’t mock, there are days when I might just eat a dog turd on request.
Crazy Nurse considers suicidal ideation.
The thing is, I know that thinking like this isn’t a good state to be in. This means I have some insight. If I have insight, I must be fairly okay. My friends who trained in psych consider it the mental version of chest pain: if you present in A+E with shortness of breath and chest pain, you are going to be seen quickly, given IV morphine and given a bed for the night. There are numerous patients well known to my A+E and the wards who have identified this and hence present frequently . . . as sure as you are that they have not had any form of cardiac event and just need a save haven for a couple of days or some reassurance; it is not a risk you can take because “time is [cardiac] muscle” and thus for their safety you admit them and treat them until diagnosis, or lack thereof, can be confirmed.
In mental health: people present with suicidal ideation — if you turn up saying you re going to kill yourself and appear a bit unstable, you will be admitted. Even if the staff are confident you wouldn’t actually do anything, they have to keep you safe. They tell me this is because there have too many people in the past who have been sent home and then gone and actually killed themselves.
Seaneen is thinking of writing a book.
I’m not a big fan “misery memoirs” so that’s not something I’d like to write. They can be rather formulaic, even though some are well written. Their structure reminds me of the Take a Break articles: everything is all good, I have so much in my life, it all goes wrong, I had this treatment, I got better, once again my life is awesome. Which is true in a lot of peoples’ lives but to me the most interesting things about madness (a term I use a lot, I know) is the perception filter that comes with it, the way you experience things, not just the experiences themselves. The descent itself, not only described by diagnostic criteria, but by the way the edges of your world begin to dissolve. If I started off with, “This person has manic depression”, you almost know what to expect. It would be interesting, for me at least, to write about it without being hampered from the start by the readers’ knowledge of what to expect from manic depression.
Serotonin has an interesting post on OCD and religious belief.
This is hard for me to talk about but I will do it, because I want people to understand that OCD isn’t just about rituals & chanting mantras.It’s as much to do with Intrusive Thoughts.These Thoughts started to overwhelm me at work on the ward.I started worrying about contammination from blood borne infections like Hep C/HIV.My mind started playing tricks on me in such a way that I was convinced that I’d become infected.The rational side to me battled away against the Thoughts.All this came to a head last December when after a year & a half of battling these Thoughts, praying to God, receiving prayer at church etc, I just couldn’t face it any more & decided to get help from my GP.I wrote out my concerns in letter form & gave it to him.He put me on a very low dose of Venlafaxine & referred me to CMHT.Christmas was the worst experience for me.I battled all the contammination thoughts over & over.Fortunately I was able to speak to a Christian lady about it & get a lot of support.But it has knocked my faith in God again, even though I had made a recomittment last year.To be honest going to church & reading the bible added to the OCD.I now know that spiritual stuff & OCD actually go hand in hand.I am not a practising Christian at the moment, I don’t actually know what I am any more or whether I will go back to it again.
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