Maybe it’s too late to stick my oar in the water, but I did think that people were unduly dismissive of Q.N. Jones, especially those whose experience is with mental illnesses other than bipolar disorder. One thing to remember is that bipolar people often spend years being unsuccessfully treated for depression (or other mental disorders, but I think that’s the most common wrong diagnosis). So other people coming in and effectively equating their experience with depression with her experience with bipolar disorder is going to be a bit of a sore spot.
Correct me if I’m wrong, Q.N., but the real difference seems to be between, “You’ll still be the same person you were…,” and “We won’t think any less of you because…” The latter is supportive, the former may or may not be, depending on whether the person even wants to still be the same person.
I checked in earlier as a successfully diagnosed and treated bipolar person and this is exactly right. I didn’t mean to imply that a quick trip to any random psychiatrist could fix things. I had several wrong diagnoses for years and the medications literally almost killed me and almost ripped whole families apart. Demand for top tier psychiatric services is high and I had enough sense to figure out where I needed to go as a last resort.
I just showed up at Harvard Medical School’s psychiatric hospital and told the inpatient receptionist that I was psychotic and I planned to kill myself in the parking lot if I didn’t see someone right then. I don’t know if if I was actually suicidal but I was desperate and the gambit worked as it does with most hospitals of that type. I was admitted inpatient within an hour and they called in some of the best doctors and residents in the world. Within two hours, I was sitting in the middle of a 20 person team of doctors and residents describing everything that had happened while they took and compared notes and used them as a collaborative teaching case. The residents don’t often get to see bipolar patients in the manic phase because they don’t usually go to the ER so I had a lot of attention.
I was there for 7 days as they monitored the response to different drugs inpatient. I responded strongly to lithium within 7 days and have been basically normal (in my own way) since then. I also got assigned to one of the foremost bipolar disorder experts in the world as an outpatient psychiatrist and that has been invaluable on its own to this day. My experiences with plain psychiatrists was less than favorable mostly trending towards malpractice. That medical specialty seems to attract more whack-jobs than average but the really good ones are a gift from heaven.
I hope Sarah gets the best care but always remains skeptical towards any given treatment especially if things seem to be going badly. Speaking as a former Ivy League grad student in behavioral neuroscience, the brain is still a mystery and many psychiatric treatments are stumbled upon rather than scientifically deduced. That means there is a lot of individual variation and trial and error and the whole process can take a while meaning many months or even years. It took almost 3 years for me to get good results. That takes a good deal of effort on the part of the patient and lithium treatments require regular blood tests because the toxic dose is uncomfortably close to the therapeutic dose.
That’s how I interpreted it, too. I don’t have bipolar disorder, but I’ve struggled with depression and social anxiety disorder for years. If I’d spoken to my boss about my conditions and gotten the same reaction, I would have felt tremendous relief.