If, on your first visit to your psychiatrist, he/she places you on one of the most common forms of psychiatric medicines, you had better beware. A single session is not ample time for a psychiatrist to do a thorough diagnosis of you.
Many of the common medicines for depression, bi-polar disorder and other psychiatric problems can have severe side effects. Some will make a suicidal patient worse. This is unfortunate because all of the television ads for these cure-alls show people running in meadows and otherwise having life-changing experiences.
I once told a psychiatrist, after he had changed my medicine a couple of times-to no avail, that he could save his time if he had a local club come in and place some of those gumball machines in his waiting room and fill them with pills. That way, people could get a little Zoloft, Paxil or Cymbalta, from the machines, at a reasonable cost, and the psychiatrist could go fishing or stay home. He asked me not to return.
Now, I don’t want to be too hard on these medicines. I now take Cymbalta and it has done wonders for me. I am still alive to write this. But, I put myself on Cymbalta, experimentally, after I had seen the effect it had on my wife. Oddly, it was one of the few medications the psychiatrist never got around to prescribing.
Use your instincts. Animals know when danger, or potential danger, is near and they react accordingly. We have come to ignore our own instincts. If you think your psychiatrist is a “quack,” you may have a very valid reason for your anxiety over him/her.
I have many friends in the fields of psychiatry and psychology. I think they are probably good, but then I have never used their services. One couple, who are close friends of ours, takes turns talking to me about my psyche. They know I went through a terrible time of anxiety and depression before and following prostate-cancer surgery. It was following the surgery that I became suicidal. Their advice and encouragement have been far better for me than any advice or encouragement for which I, or my insurance, paid.
Every one of the psychiatrists, psychologists and counselors to whom I was sent were more interested in finding me a pill that would “numb” my senses than they were in delving into what was really the root cause of my problems. At my worst, I was able to see through them.
Use the instincts and sense that God (or Mother Nature) gave you. Don’t be afraid of hurting a doctor’s feelings when it is your life on the line. Simply tell them your association with them does not seem to be working and move on to another therapist, or find some other way to deal with your problems.
Please don’t forget that many times we have physiological problems that can manifest themselves at psychological problems. Make sure you have exhausted your opportunities with physicians, D.O.s, M.D.s, etc. before you decide your problem is undeniably mental.
In my own case, the root cause was indeed physiological. But, it became a trigger for psychological issues. While the Paxil, and numerous discussions with friends and colleagues, help; it seems I will have to deal with the psychological problems as the physiological problems cannot be mended.
