The US government payed for my masters on the condition that I work for a federal agency after graduating. I now need the continued support of my psychiatrist to handle classified material. If I lose that, I lose my job, have broken contract, and have to pay back the cost of my degree.
It is certainly less than ideal for the purpose of effective therapy, but at least I’ve finally found a therapist who is on board with non-pharmaceutical treatments.
Is there some reason why you can’t also see a second therapist, possibly without the first one knowing about it? It seems to me that it might be useful for you to do so.
I can have as many therapists as I can afford, and I wouldn’t need to tell them about each other (though it would probably be wisest to), but I do need to tell my employer about every source of help I’m receiving, and each source will be contacted.
What is the objection to pharmaceutical treatments? Mood stabilisers are a class of drugs that actually do work reliably (as opposed to, say, SSRIs for depression). Although I suppose you don’t really need a ‘pharmacutical’ company to use lithium. Doctors have been treating patients with lithium since the second century.
My objection is purely based on the side effects I’ve experienced, and I’ve only been on a limited number of drugs. Every mood stabilizer that I’ve been on has left me intellectually and emotionally crippled. That is perhaps putting it too strongly, but when I stopped the last drug I was on, my internal reaction was “Oh. This is what it’s like to be alive. I had forgotten.” The really upsetting thing was that I had slowly faded (cognitively) to where I didn’t even notice that I was impaired, even though I had stopped getting work done and stopped participating in relationships. I was a pre-op Algernon (or Charlie, I guess), and that’s not a person I’m willing to be.
I haven’t actually taken lithium. I believe it’s not as useful for treating depression, which is my real problem, but it’s probably a bad idea for me to have around anyway; psychiatrists avoid prescribing it to patients who have a history of suicidal tendencies, because it is so toxic that it is occasionally used by those patients in suicide attempts.
How did you come to be in such an uncomfortable position with such obviously counterproductive incentives?
The US government payed for my masters on the condition that I work for a federal agency after graduating. I now need the continued support of my psychiatrist to handle classified material. If I lose that, I lose my job, have broken contract, and have to pay back the cost of my degree.
It is certainly less than ideal for the purpose of effective therapy, but at least I’ve finally found a therapist who is on board with non-pharmaceutical treatments.
Is there some reason why you can’t also see a second therapist, possibly without the first one knowing about it? It seems to me that it might be useful for you to do so.
I can have as many therapists as I can afford, and I wouldn’t need to tell them about each other (though it would probably be wisest to), but I do need to tell my employer about every source of help I’m receiving, and each source will be contacted.
What is the objection to pharmaceutical treatments? Mood stabilisers are a class of drugs that actually do work reliably (as opposed to, say, SSRIs for depression). Although I suppose you don’t really need a ‘pharmacutical’ company to use lithium. Doctors have been treating patients with lithium since the second century.
My objection is purely based on the side effects I’ve experienced, and I’ve only been on a limited number of drugs. Every mood stabilizer that I’ve been on has left me intellectually and emotionally crippled. That is perhaps putting it too strongly, but when I stopped the last drug I was on, my internal reaction was “Oh. This is what it’s like to be alive. I had forgotten.” The really upsetting thing was that I had slowly faded (cognitively) to where I didn’t even notice that I was impaired, even though I had stopped getting work done and stopped participating in relationships. I was a pre-op Algernon (or Charlie, I guess), and that’s not a person I’m willing to be.
I haven’t actually taken lithium. I believe it’s not as useful for treating depression, which is my real problem, but it’s probably a bad idea for me to have around anyway; psychiatrists avoid prescribing it to patients who have a history of suicidal tendencies, because it is so toxic that it is occasionally used by those patients in suicide attempts.