Now wait a minute, though I am no fan of psychiatry, I certainly don’t believe depression is just not real, nor is “sucking it up” an appropriate treatment. What you have to admit is that for a significant percentage of clinically depressed patients, their problem is beyond the capabilities of modern medicine to treat. For some people, there is no answer, and they will never feel better, no matter how many doctors they visit, how many hours they spend in therapy, or how many medications they try. It is not encouraging to consider, but it is the plain fact.
Ah, well then, that was my fault. Again, I appologize.
By doctor, I was basically saying, “Ask your PCP for a referral to someone who might help.”
I guess I just get testy about this because I get tired of having to constantly justify a method that works for ME. And when people make cracks about “over-medicated”, “pussies who can’t cope”, “bullshit illnesses”, etc, it really pisses me off. This isn’t an excuse, mind you, just an explanation. I shouldn’t have to appologize for the way I live my life.
Okay, also fair and apology happily accepted.
Not even so much your post in the original thread but so many many post that just went into diagnosis mode based on almost no information. I guess that is my entire objection.
Jim
I don’t think that this woman said anything about an “online survey.” There are standard symptoms for diagnosing depression. They are not determined by drug companies. Since no one should diagnose themselves, recommending a professional is SOP. She also didn’t say that she was “feeling blue.”
You are certainly right though that one can be depressed without having depression. That’s why it gets some people confused and they just write it off as “feeling crappy.” In some of the worst of depression, you don’t feel anything.
[quote]
Kalhoun: …feeling crappy about the rough spots in life, and medicating so you don’t feel them, doesn’t always mean you need a doctor’s care.
Well sure, except that’s not depression. Prozac, for example, is not a “happy pill.” If I understand correctly, if your seratonin is not too low, then taking prozac will not make you feel better. The medication allows some people who take it to feel normal again.
Often my own bouts with deepening depression came when I wasn’t having any “rough spots” except for the depression itself.
I can’t speak to Siege’s experience, but you know there is a human being inside a catatonic patient. That human being is capable of remembering. And what the patient can’t remember, she or he can be told.
Maybe this will help to describe the exterior characteristics:
Tell me, Big Red, why do you ask?
I think this is a misstatement of current knowleddge. When you look at large numbers of studies, there is evidence that antidepressant medications work, although overall they may not be dramatically more effective than placebo. That does not mean that they “rely primarily…on placebo effects” to get results.
While it is quite possible that they are overprescribed, there are a lot of people who are thankful that drugs allowed them to get back on with their lives, and without having to deal long-term with the murk of psychiatric analysis.
Any overuse of these drugs is still, in my opinion, less of a problem in society than defining depression as"…feeling crappy about the rough spots in life, and medicating so you don’t feel them". No on who has ever suffered from moderate to major depression (or tried to help someone in that circumstance) would ever make such a statement.
AHunter’s opinions sometimes differ from my own, but I respect his contributions on this and other subjects.
[QUOTE=Zoe]
I don’t think that this woman said anything about an “online survey.” There are standard symptoms for diagnosing depression. They are not determined by drug companies. Since no one should diagnose themselves, recommending a professional is SOP. She also didn’t say that she was “feeling blue.”
You are certainly right though that one can be depressed without having depression. That’s why it gets some people confused and they just write it off as “feeling crappy.” In some of the worst of depression, you don’t feel anything.
I agree. Depression is a real problem, but I think too many people jump to the “depression” diagnosis/conclusion (patients and doctors alike) when it really isn’t true depression. I think it’s extremely difficult to diagnose true depression. Just saying you are depressed doesn’t make it clinically so. Yet, that is frequently all it takes for a doctor to prescribe antidepressants and other medications.
Because she’s a broken record with her “catatonia”, it seems she manages to bring in how she was “close to catatonic” into mostly unrelated topics. She got called on it in this thread and this thread, but she’s back at it again.
Unrelated topics, sure. But since we’re talking about depression and mental illness, maybe, just MAYBE talking about one’s experience with it is relevant?
Well, had you read the links I posted, you would know it’s not just that (from the thread):
Well true, and to be fair, in the one you quoted her on, I initially called her on it. And yeah, I agree I think sometimes Siege tends to be a bit self-centered. I’m just saying I don’t think there’s anything wrong with pointing it out HERE, in THIS thread, that she tried to go it alone and failed.
Maybe she brings it up too often, maybe she doesn’t. I can’t say I’ve particularly noticed, nor do I much care if she wants to mention it whenever the mood strikes her. However, it seems to me you people who have made it a hobby to jump on her shit about it are taking the phrase “almost catatonic” just a bit too literally. I read it as descriptive way to get across the idea that she was out of it to the point of being unable to move, care, feel or do anything. I don’t think she means it as a literal claim that she was almost in an actual clinical catatonic state. Sheesh, haven’t you people heard of metaphors? I’ve been known to say of someone I was very angry with that “I nearly strangled him!” If I’d told you that, would you think I meant that I literally wrestled him to the floor and began to squeeze the life out of him with my bare hands around his throat? I would hope not.
I have only fleeting, superficial experience with depression. But I’ve read probably a couple thousand Pittings, and this one sucks.
Isn’t that what AHunter3 was doing?
So, if you introduce the same thing into this thread that was covered in that thread and that thread, are you a broken record?
Her experiences are relevant to this thread. Bitching that someone is bringing up a relevant experience is dumb. Bitching that they are bringing up an irrelevant experience would make sense, but that’s not the issue here.
No. He’s taking his experience, assuming it’s exactly the same, and stating basically that mental illness doesn’t exist, and that people shouldn’t seek therapy, because they’ll just get screwed. Or people are saying, “Don’t talk to a doctor-they’ll put you on the EEEEVILLLL meds!”
I don’t mind hearing about his experience. I DO mind the whole, “psychology/psychiatry is a crock and they’re an evil conspiracy to lock us up and mental illness is just a trait of your personality.”
That’s a good point. He’s obviously talking about his own experiences, though he does occasionally couch them in language that implies the same is or could be true of everyone.
But so do I. So do all Dopers, in one way or another.
Perhaps the best way is simply to say, “This is my experience. Take what you can use and disregard the rest.” But it can be very difficult, at least for me, not to interject advice, even when it’s not my place.
Then why is it the only metaphor she uses? I believe that she believes she was actually catatonic, that’s the way it comes across to me.
Guin, this thread was about AHunter3, and she mentions him in the first sentence, then it’s all about HER. She says “I” 25 times, and AHunter3 once, which is strange since the thread is about AHunter3, not her.
And with that, I believe I’ve hijacked enough.
“Can”? Any damn circumstances under which, for any conceivable reason, they wish to, as long as they have a colleague who will issue a concurring opinion. And in many venues that’s pretty damn pro forma. As I recently posted in some other thread, the concurring shrink doesn’t need to evaluate you in person. They don’t have to give you any particular test or assessment. They can view you for 3 minutes through the plexiglass barrier, read the first shrink’s notes, and cosign the commitment.
Does that mean the halls are teeming with shrinks who incarcerate people willy-nilly for nefarious reasons or for no reason at all? No. I would say that upwards of 20% of the people they have locked up involuntarily are not a serious & legitimate danger to themselves or other people, but it’s not like they often tend to lock folks up for voting the wrong way, for belonging to a different religion or being of a different race, etc. (Not that that absolutely doesn’t happen, mind you — it does — but it’s rare). The most common abuse of authority is in the grey area where the shrink feels that you need psychiatric treatment and that, in the absence of it, you will make poorly considered choices and ruin your life, or will fail to make therapeutic progress. Believing you to need the treatment, and believing that your disagreement on that (or on the specifics of that) is due to your being too sick to understand what you need, many shrinks will stretch the definition of “danger to self” to include this making of decisions that the shrink thinks are inadvisable.
With rare exceptions, if you do not see a shrink, and don’t do something that precipitates involuntary commitment on the basis of a single act considered crazy in and of itself (attempt suicide, go walking through subway tunnels, dive off an 80-story building with a parachute on your back, climb into the lion’s cage to pet the lions in the zoo, etc), it’s not likely that some psychiatrist is going to come along and have you, a total stranger, committed.
If, on the other hand, you get into an emotional state 5-6 times a year and when you do so you go to the nearest hospital emergency room and ask to see a mental health worker on an emergency basis because you need help Right Now, it’s considerably more likely that on one such occasion the MH doctor will commit you even if you aren’t dangerous.
If you have a regular psychiatrist and you have a good rapport, and your shrink has no problem with you deciding against recommended treatment, it’s only likely to happen if the doctor sincerely misinterprets something you say or recount having done as an attempt to kill or maim yourself (or, far less often, someone else).
If, on the other hand, you’re looking for that good-rapport psychiatrist, and to that end you are seeing one, and this doctor wants to put you on a regimen that you don’t want to be on, well, that could be an unfortunate time to discover that this doctor that you’re trying out does have a problem with you not taking advice, and it is in such a circumstance that many of us in the psych patients’ rights movement got our first taste of involuntary psychiatry.
Another situation where it’s more of a risk is if someone who knows you consulted the psychiatrist first, spoke to the psychiatrist about your problems as they perceived them, and then informed you that they had a doctor friend who would like to help you. Sometimes it is a family member (parent, spouse, child, etc), sometimes it is an employer or an administrator at a school that you attend, something like that. You go in and sometimes find that the psychiatrist is starting off from “This person is disruptive and upsetting to the people around them, I know because they spoke to me about it”, and if the shrink is unable to get your cooperation in changing you to end your disruptiveness, your treatment could become less voluntary rather quickly. This is more common with psychiatrists working in private hospitals. State-run bins have their own problems, but netting people in this fashion is generally not one of them.
OK, I’m blathering on again and I feel the box under my feet. :smack:
[QUOTE=Go You Big Red Fire Engine]
Then why is it the only metaphor she uses?/QUOTE]
Why not? If, indeed, her point is as I read it, it’s a good metaphor–if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I use the “I nearly strangled him/her” metaphor quite a lot, too, because it gets across the intensity of my anger with that person quite well. I’ve never actually tried to strangle anyone, however. Of course, I can’t speak for her, but just based on the links you posted it doesn’t parse as if she meant it literally.
YMMV.
I really just don’t see what you’re talking about:
Even the more strongly-worded sections still don’t sound to me like the rantings you seem to be perceiving:
Which is completely true: One goes to a doctor (of any type) because one doesn’t know how to fix one’s problem oneself, so a trained professional is needed. The entire point of going to an expert is to get treatment that you can’t do for yourself. In other words, the point is to put your well-being in someone else’s hands and trust them to act knowledgeably and in your best interest. If there are widespread doubts about the effectiveness of certain treatments, or about the reliability of measures that are in place to protect vulnerable patients, then people should absolutely know that before they go to such professionals. It doesn’t mean “Don’t do it”; it means “arm yourself with as much information as possible before you do it.”
Is this somehow NOT excellent advice?