The Disorders and Character Flaws Thread

[ThePhanastasio]

I'm really not a huge fan of the psychiatric community. I guess I could just rephrase that to say that I'm not a fan of the community in my particular city, but because of my experiences with them, I'm pretty wary of psychiatrists in general.

There's only one major psychiatric practice in my area, and it features half a dozen psychiatrists, in-patient and out-patient facilities, a plethora of therapists, halfway houses, and things like that. They've got quite a reputation for misdiagnosis and for ****ing people up.

I have one friend who has finally been correctly diagnosed and treated for having nothing more than ADHD and Seasonal Affective Disorder. The doctors here diagnosed him as having Histrionic Personality Disorder and suggested that he might be autistic. It wasn't until he graduated high school that he was properly diagnosed and treated for his actual illness, and he's still pretty messed up from having to go through high school thinking that something else was wrong with him when it wasn't.

Yet another friend was misdiagnosed as having Borderline Personality Disorder (and medicated as such) when it wasn't realized until her senior year of high school that she actually had Aspergers. As can be imagined, the medicinal treatment for Borderline was not helpful for Aspergers.

My own personal experience started in my freshman year of high school. I had been having highs and lows which lasted for weeks at a time since seventh grade, but finally, my freshman year, I had an extremely bad episode. It featured really high energy, racing thoughts, and auditory hallucinations. I was irritable, paranoid, and completely out of it.

My mother had me take a week off school to go to the psychiatrist and get treated / stabilized, and I was diagnosed after three days of meeting with the therapist - an Indian gentleman who looked a great deal like George Jefferson aside from the fact that he was Indian - I was diagnosed as being paranoid schizophrenic, and was immediately placed on 30MG of Zyprexa, an anti-psychotic.

30MG is, from what I understand now, the highest dose of Zyprexa which can be given, and I later found out that it's not to be given to patients under the age of 18 because of medical risks associated with the drug. A typical starter dose, however, was 5MG a day.

I went through two years of high school pretty much zombified, suffering from crippling depression in addition to the numbness and was finally hospitalized after what was believed to be a suicide attempt - to be honest, I'm not even sure what I was doing.

After that, they significantly lowered the dose of my medication and put me on some sort of anti-depressant along with the anti-psychotic. I can't remember the name of the anti-depressant, because I stopped taking both of the drugs shortly thereafter, and refused to go back to the psychiatrist. I felt like things had only gotten worse, and my family agreed, but tried to get me to at least take the anti-depressant.

I was completely terrified and confused, so I was irrational. I refused completely, and my two years as a zombie had hurt my family too much for them to want to see me like that again, so they didn't make me go back.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college and the few years following that - I began abusing copious amounts of substances, which I've actually mentioned previously in the Confessions thread, and don't really want to go into right now. I was set to self-destruct, my moods were horrible...sometimes, I'd be up and almost euphoric...really social and bubbly. Other times, I'd be up, but reckless. This is when most of the substance abuse / sexual deviance / etc. occurred. In these times, I was also often paranoid...I'd think that people could read my mind during particularly bad episodes, think that private correspondence had been intercepted and read by other people, think that people were talking negatively about me when they so much as glanced in my direction during conversation, and on one occasion, that I'd actually died and had created everything around me as an afterlife for myself to cope with the trauma of being dead. I also had really horrible periods of deep depression in which I couldn't even motivate myself to get out of bed, answer my phone, or anything like that.

I finally went back to therapy, thinking that since I was completely unable to function as a normal human being at that point that being zombified even would be ideal, and they observed me and took some more tests.

Finally, they informed me that I wasn't schizophrenic - I just had an extremely bad case of Bipolar I. Rapid cycling. My manic states often had psychotic characteristics, but I wasn't schizophrenic. At this point, I was prescribed a mood stabilizer and anti-depressant.

I was, however, (understandably I think) still wary about psychiatry after what I'd been through. I stopped going to the psychiatrist, and stopped taking my medicine again...I should probably mention that all of this went down while I was in a very serious relationship with a girl. Eventually, she decided that she couldn't deal with it and it wasn't her problem to deal with, and we broke up. That's about when I really stopped taking my medicine...

My mother is trying to get me to go back to the psychiatrist, but I have several issues at present. 1) I no longer have health insurance. 2) I'm scared to ****ing death of psychiatrists now. 3) I feel like I lose my identity entirely when I'm medicated; I can't write, do what I feel is efficient theatre character development, or get as excited about music most of the time. 4) I still don't like to think that I'm ****ed up or defective. That's how psychiatrists make me feel.

With that said...I'm probably going back anyway in the New Year. If, for nothing else, just to make sure that my most recent diagnosis as Bipolar I stands, and see if there's anything they can do to help me without making me into someone else entirely.