This Week in Mentalists (50)

Wooooo! This Week in Mentalists is 50 today! And so, This Week in Mentalists is sat at home, wondering where all its dreams went, and fretting about how Global Mentalist News Roundup doesn’t seem to call or even remember birthdays much these days.

The Shrink asks what can medicine do for dementia patients if medication won’t help?

As a doctor, when medication won’t help, and I can’t change the underlying process at all, my role is mostly explanation and psychoeducation, with a touch of patient and carer support thrown in too. The biggest thing I do, typically, is to involve the right colleagues.

When someone has dementia they need advice on a lot of things (initial assessment letters often run to over a dozen points for various folk to act on). After this, input is provided according to need.

My stab at the simple answer of what’s done could be that, “appropriate patient centred health care and social welfare is provided with dignity and respect.”

The complicated answer is that we need to understand the person, we need to understand them very well indeed.

Life From the Sofa weighs up the negatives and positives from spending time in a therapeutic community.

Negatives

I gave up a longstanding full time job to attend the TC and haven’t managed to cope with work since.

I now self harm frequently, despite not having done so for years before I went there.

It has reinforced my mad status, rather than removed it. I am much more of a professional mental patient than I ever was, and having being deemed nutty enough to need to be in a TC, my gp now sees me as someone with severe mental health problems, rather than someone who suffers from occasional depression.

Discovering what feelings are has made my mood swings so much more painful. It’s not just about anger anymore, and after a year of being told that I am to blame, I have no one to shift those feelings onto. I’ve never felt suicidal for so long.

Being around people day in day out made me need human contact. Now that I am isolated again, apart from one friend and one family member, I find it much more difficult to cope with being alone. Yet the motivation to change that is still missing.

Positives

I made a good friend at therapy and we are still in touch.

I can eat in front of other people without feeling ashamed.

I can usually realise the triggers behind my moodswings.

I am back in touch with my Dad, after two years of not speaking. Something which the therapists pushed me to do.

Mentally Interesting: The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive is feeling hyper.

I am wondering if it’s acclimatising to Effexor. I’m not on a huge dose- 75mg- and the only other side effects that I’ve had so far have been that I’ve been sleeping a lot less and have completely lost my appetite. I went out today (and there is something else I haven’t been doing, and I even put on make up and proper clothes, which I haven’t been bothering with lately) and got myself a sandwich, thinking that I really should eat something. I managed a bite of it before throwing it in the bin and at 7pm, I’m still not hungry. Still have racing thoughts.

Writing in the Margins of my Minds looks at pastoral support in schools.

These days I am frequently bombarded with “places to go for help”. The school nurse, Connexions PA, school counsellor, the voluntary agency counsellor, they all hold clinics in school, and it is therefore assumed that it’s easy for us to access these services. They’re there. But that doesn’t always mean that it’s easy to get help.

Our school nurse is amazing (hell, she drove me & my post-overdose friend to A&E last week when she refused an ambulance), but she can only get in one or two days a week, because she’s got a primary school to cover and is responsible for LAC. The one hour drop in session she does a week is in the worst room in the school. Primarily because it’s in a corridor that you’re not allowed to be in, which means you face interrogation from teachers as to why you’re there. Now, that’s fine for me because I have no problems with people assuming I’m crazy or in need of an STI test when I tell them why I’m there, but I’d imagine that’s fairly off putting for the younger ones.

Seeing the Connexions PA involves tracking down a folder in which you can make an appointment that you may or may not end up actually getting to go to. For years 7 to 11, seeing the school counsellor involves parental permission, which is perhaps the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

Aethelred the Unread considers depression and cognitive impairment.

First of all, my sense of time is definitely up the creek. Usually when I wake up in the morning I have absolutely no idea what day it is. Sometimes, if I think very hard, it comes to me, but often I have to check the date on my clock, and then check the day on the calendar in order to know. I also loose track of time during the day. Earlier today I had a bath, and I thought I’d spent about 20 minutes heaving my blubbery carcass in and out of the water, but it was actually more like 90. I started trying to write this post about 2½ hours ago, and given that this is only the fifth full paragraph, I would have estimated I’d been at it for no longer than 30 minutes.

This maybe doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it kind of is for me. I’ve always had a very accurate sense of time. Except for things like railway journeys with lots of connections and job interviews I’ve never worn a watch. No-one is ever totally accurate, of course, but assuming I’ve checked a clock within the last three hours or so, I would expect my time estimates to be accurate to within a quarter of an hour, give or take. (I discovered I had this ability, by the way, because it took me so bloody long to learn to tell the time – people tend to get pissed off being asked what the time is every 5 seconds for years on end…) That’s not really the bit that worries me, though.