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Still more praise for the flipping Maudsley method
“It doesn’t work that way,” Ms. Brown said in an interview. “You need the physical recovery first, and then the cognitive recovery. The patient is racked with guilt, anxiety, feeling she’s fat and loathsome if she eats - it was our job to be louder and drown out those voices in her head.”Dear New ( Read more... )
“It doesn’t work that way,” Ms. Brown said in an interview. “You need the physical recovery first, and then the cognitive recovery. The patient is racked with guilt, anxiety, feeling she’s fat and loathsome if she eats - it was our job to be louder and drown out those voices in her head.”Dear New ( Read more... )
It's shocking really that psychiatric illness of whatever variety is still looked at as something that someone can be in any way forced to recover from. It doesn't work like that! It's not like appendicitis where once you perform surgery recovery is awfully quick. Pardon the bad analogy, but it's like what you would see on an episode of House. You see the outwardly apparent symptoms and then have to dig and dig to figure out what the underlying cause is and THEN you can start the (typically rather lengthy) process of finding a workable treatment regimen and implementing it. If I had a dollar every time I was told by someone who used to be very close to me that I should go take a Xanax because I was irritable, I would be a wealthy woman. There was this attitude that I should just take the pill and be done with it, without ever touching the WHY of the irritability or panic or anxiety or short-temper or anything else. Yes, I love my Xanax. Yes, I take it when I need it and I am very glad I have it at my disposal. But don't you dare tell me to just go pop a pill as if that should be a solution I'm happy with.
Wow, got off on a bit of a tangent there. Sorry.
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Your entire first paragraph says what I would love to say to everyone who Doesn't Get It. ♥
And -- yes to the digging. Yes to being unconventional about it, while we're thinking about broadening horizons. What helps me nowadays? Self-administered art therapy. Writing. Music. What helped me then? -- Well, rebellion kind of powered the second recovery. Oops? But not oops, because I figured out what I was doing to myself and why. Therapist Twit was a mirror for me: in her, I could see everything I hated about ED-recovery culture, and I struck out on my own.
I look back now because I believe there is so much room for change.
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The whole issue of clueless therapists or doctors who don't get it is such a huge point of frustration. Even people who are allegedly trained specifically as therapists or psychologists or psychiatrists can have such ridiculous blindspots. I spent about seven years misdiagnosed because I didn't fit the cookie cutter image of bipolar (at the time, the new DSM clarifies a lot of that finally) so, despite the fact that mood lability should have been pretty apparent to anyone looking and I was always very honest about the fact that my FATHER is bipolar I and pretty severely so at that, I went in circles with the idea that the sort of marginal degree of relief I got from SSRIs was as good as it was going to get. It wasn't until I started seeing a psychiatrist who wasn't concerned with making things line up in one of the perfect little diagnostic boxes and actually paid attention to my symptoms and adjusted treatment in reference to that that I really felt like I was making any progress. I'm so grateful I have her, but I'm still massively frustrated that it took as long as it did to get to that point.
There are really only two kinds of treatment -- the one that works and the one that doesn't. Music helps me immensely. IMMENSELY. Reading certain books at certain times can help me hugely. Talking to certain people helps. Sometimes sleeping helps, sometimes it makes it worse. These are the sorts of things that only time and support and patience and a willingness to keep trying are going to reveal to you.
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*glances at, holy shit, nine years since the crazy got turned up to 11*
Yes.
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