Psychiatry is Broken

A very interesting blog post slash column entitled "When Psychiatrists Distrust Their Patients, Their Patients Can Only Respond In Kind" by Rebecca Vipond Brink

She reviews the problems she has had with Psychiatrists when they become arrogant, and do not take seriously what their patients are saying. Unfortunately this is all too common.

Here are some snippets

The worst psychiatrist I had, on the other hand, seemed awesome when we started — our initial appointment was an hour long, and she probed into my family’s medical history for clues about mine. It seemed holistic. As time went on, though, appointments became sparser and shorter — she was constantly double-booked, she got to the point that she was doing five-minute refill appointments, and I was eventually on four different medications in an attempt to treat anxiety and what we thought was depression in the fallout of PTSD. When I disputed her original diagnosis at my last appointment, she responded, “That’s just not what I know about you from our work.” Our work? She had only spoken to me for a grand total of maybe two hours at that point, while I had been out in the world living my life with my emotions. I wanted to be trusted that I was the best possible source of information about my well-being, not a brief description of a few symptoms and the DSM-V.

I told her that I wanted to get off of my medications because they just weren’t working — I was still having massive, debilitating anxiety attacks, nightmares, insomnia, paranoia. I had had a full-on nervous breakdown while on medications. And I didn’t feel like anti-depressants were appropriate, because with a lot of reflection, I landed on the opinion that debilitating anxiety looks a lot like depression but is not the same thing. All of my feelings and neurotic impulses were still very intense, and yet here I was, taking more and more medications in higher and higher doses to treat them, to no effect. Instead of weaning me off of anything, she prescribed two more medications. I found out later that some of the medications she wanted me to take had unsavory interactions that she didn’t disclose to me.

[...] All of this has left me feeling more than a little suspicious about psychiatry. I felt like my psychiatrist had dismissed my opinions in her care plan, and had distrusted me and my word without me having given her any reason over the course of my treatment to do so. I felt like I had had no control over my care, and that feeling of a lack of control over what was a major part of my life was devastating — I have PTSD because of abuse and rape. Control over my body is important to me.

Much more at the the link.

Just another data point of evidence that Psychiatry is Broken