Quote:
Originally Posted by waves
... too deeply decisional ... i can say supportive/sounding board and availability off the bat are probably at the top right now. meds not right now because i don't feel fearful or lost in a pre-paranoid sense or have any other "weird" stuff going on. maybe some omens but... ok, i better not go there. i don't know.
|
Waves, 
I didn't mean to give you decision work. I was trying to put the pdoc's skills/ non skills into a priority.
My summary is that you find the
supportive / sounding board / availability more important than the other things like prescribing skills and CBT-type skills.
Quote:
Originally Posted by waves
. you can go to any clinic that is state-conventioned. there aren't any nearby, only the main state psych clinic. but i will say their pdoc who renewed my exemption last time was very kindly...........unlike the nurse who screened me.... "you're bipolar but you have 2 degrees??? [diffident tone] how did you manage that??? answer: ... "the second one only after expulsion, readmission, many Fs and retakes?" grr. idiot.
|
Somehow I had not pictured a big main state psych clinic that requires travel. People on medicare here (our version of state care) usually go to local clinics. They often have a degree of choice of pdocs but not always. Partly that is because the clinics might be in small towns that have shortages of pdocs.
Quote:
|
pdoc... i guess i've trained him to the extent that is possible.... sigh.
|
I hear you. You are not expecting any progress from the two of you together. I haven't trained my current pdoc, but we do fine. I feel that he is comfortable with me / trusts me . . . We are used to each other. We've probably been together about eight years now. I hope he keeps working. He's not a youngster.
Bizi and Waves,
I looked up Jamison. She was diagnosed after she graduated and was teaching.
http://www.bphope.com/Item.aspx?id=482
Quote:
In 1974, a colleague she had been dating diagnosed her as manic-depressive. The diagnosis came shortly after she joined the UCLA faculty as an assistant professor of psychiatry.
At the time, Jamison was in the middle of a major manic episode. She worked tremendous hours and did not sleep; she couldn’t follow the path of her own thoughts. She engaged in profligate overspending, for example, scooping up 20 books published by Penguin because she thought it would be nice if the penguins would form a colony. She bought expensive jewelry, provocative clothing, and a dozen snakebite kits because she had information direct from God that an infestation of rattlesnakes was imminent.
When Jamison was prescribed lithium, it had only recently been approved for use in mania. The standard medical practice then was to maintain patients at considerably higher blood levels of lithium than is prescribed nowadays. As a result, Jamison had terrible side effects from the drug—severe nausea and vomiting, and slurred speech that at times made her appear drunk and threw off her coordination. Mentally, she had impaired concentration and memory and an almost complete breakdown in her ability to read—devastating to one whose life revolved around ideas and research. In order to understand anything, Jamison had to read the same line repeatedly and to take copious notes. For an entire decade, she didn’t read a serious book of fiction or nonfiction.
|
M