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In my case, the county had decided that psychologists were too expensive, and done away with the job, along with the few talk therapist they'd had. It was the pdoc at your appointment or nobody. I wrote out my medical history with surgery and absorbtion limits and so forth, so they could keep it with my records. He didn't want it. If you could pick yourself up off the couch and get there, you must be doing okay was the mantra.
Its just plain malpractice when as a patient you are taking a drug which is causing things like suddenly fainting without warning, and the DOCTOR says off handedly it can't be this... and when you say but I'm not 'normal' inside, so there's no way to know, and all they do is push their pills and get rid of you for another few months.
Most people are not going to need more, or don't want more. But when I woke up, sleeping on the couch with the tv on and could barely sit up, then found a pan on the stove, boiled dry and hot I drew a line. I also went to my medical doctor but the pdoc dismissed her too. She supported me backing out the meds. I decided I would remove all the likelys and back the whole mess to less and the scary stuff stopped. But my mind got clear too, and I realized how heavily over drugged I was.
If pdocs don't have the time then SOMEONE trained in the physical effects and the problems they make needs to be available IF they are giving these pills out like candy. No doctor to see for problems, no pills get dispensed.
I found that most of the 'symptoms' I was having which I got the pills for were made far worse with the meds, and taking more just made it much much worse. Its my body chemistry, but NOBODY listened. I'm stubborn enough to say no more and stop them but I don't buy that the person who's so much in a stupor they can't remember where they are is 'better'.
I just wonder how many people have done something to themself, or died, or some purely medical doctor is trying to figure out why but doesn't have the whole picture. These mass systems MUST be responsible for ALL results no matter the hastle. Patients shouldn't have to feel like they're turning the roulette wheel each time they take a pill.
First I want to say you are very inspirational in the way you figured this out for yourself! IDK what to say about some of these Drs. For my friend, her pdoc often wants to change 4 things at once and I always say no! How then will you know which is doing what? As to the zombie thing - I wonder sometimes if that is just safer to them. To have a zombie patient than to risk mania or psychosis. I don't have another idea as to what their deal is on that part.
My mother had manic depression her entire adult life...until my father and I found her hanging two years ago.
She was on lithium for the vast majority of that time until there started to show damaging side effects of the drug to part of her insides (can't remember if it was kidneys or liver).
She thought she could just stop taking her lithium (which helped her through a 35 year career at the railroad - a union job which had it not been, she probably would have lost that job several times over because of hospitalizations over the years), but she was wrong.
I wish the hospital would have kept her the week before when they released her, and I wish the last time she was hospitalized it didn't ring up a $70k bill, of which she was hit with 10 percent of...
I think she wanted to end it all because she didn't want us, her children, to be left with nothing because of another hospitalization or two that would have hit her financially again.
Yes, manic depression (bipolar) illness is very real.
35 years is too long on lithium. Her Dr should have changed her. And, it is kidneys not liver that it affects.
No one's asking you to weigh a thought. But the brain isn't something abstract that exists nowhere. It's still part of the body. The mental health profession wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, they'll say an illness of the mind shouldn't be viewed the same as an illness of the body, as if the mind is somehow completely separate from the body. But on the other hand, they're OK with prescribing drugs that have a clear physical effect on the brain. I've comes across articles that talk about studies done on people with BP versus people without BP. And they show clear physical differences. If a person has memories problems, we can do a scan of their brain and see where their might be damage to the memory centers. But when psychiatrists diagnose BP, they don't do a brain scan. They basically do an interview and say "you're exhibiting A, B, and C therefore you must be BP. Don't ask me what causes BP cause I have no idea. Take this drug. Don't ask me how it works cause I have no idea." If a doctor ever told me I had a disease, but he couldn't say what the cause was and then he told me to take a drug for it, but couldn't say how that drug worked, I'd get up and walk out."
They can do brain scans and see differences due to uni-polar depression and bipolar, schizophrenia etc. It's just not diagnostically very helpful. The symptoms are of far more importance. I have a joke with my friend. She hates the label. So we don't talk about the name. We have different joke names for it, but what matters is how she feels and functions, so that is what all med talk relates to.
We do know that bipolar is genetic but then needs a stressor, or trigger, later in life. We do not know the exact action of lithium, but it has been around the very longest and more studies have been done on it than any other drug for MI.
It was discovered when people with anxiety/stress would take baths in lithium salt and it calmed them, so someone thought 'what happens if we give it to a manic person?' Brilliant. Saved many people from being chained up screaming in basements of 'psych hospitals'. That is how it was then. Gruesome.
That is a fear based response.
As I predicted in the previous post,
"But the underlying problem causing it all is fear.
Get rid of the fear, see all the other symptoms dissolve like magic."
As I said, I had it and now I don't.
Either you never had it or you are in remission. And maybe remission will last for life. But you still either had it or you didn't. One other possibility is 'substance induced' mania that can and often does resolve itself. But it has the potential of creating pathways in the brain that make it so that the victim could go on to have symptoms that have now become an organic disorder. Such a person would need to take great care with all substances.
Another thing besides diet that is often overlooked is things that naturally produce substances. For instance sun produces serotonin. If someone needs to avoid too much serotonin, they need to avoid too much sun. (and then there is dopamine and so on, but that is just one example).
Of course on the other end, sunlight could help a depressed person stay off Anti-depressants, particularly if they respond best to serotonin.
And I doubt any of what you just said. But doesn't it bother you that doctors can't tell you what the cause of your illness is? Or when they put you on drugs, don't you want to know how exactly those drugs work?
We know HOW they work, sometimes we don't know the WHY. We know what SSRIs do and theorize that higher levels of serotonin help with depression. A theory under great debate, by the way. I really don't like SSRIs so I won't talk too much about that. I think ADs are handed out way, way too frequently when so many people would do better to get sunshine, and do talk therapy, do activities that make them feel good, etc.
We know HOW they work, sometimes we don't know the WHY. We know what SSRIs do and theorize that higher levels of serotonin help with depression. A theory under great debate, by the way. I really don't like SSRIs so I won't talk too much about that. I think ADs are handed out way, way too frequently when so many people would do better to get sunshine, and do talk therapy, do activities that make them feel good, etc.
The stuff is handed out like candy. I have never known one person who was denied.
First I want to say you are very inspirational in the way you figured this out for yourself! IDK what to say about some of these Drs. For my friend, her pdoc often wants to change 4 things at once and I always say no! How then will you know which is doing what? As to the zombie thing - I wonder sometimes if that is just safer to them. To have a zombie patient than to risk mania or psychosis. I don't have another idea as to what their deal is on that part.
I know that for most its not as complicated, but I'm missing a few parts of the digestive/asorbtion system. The surgeon warned me to tell every doctor about it as it changes the body chemistry and effects drugs. My family doctor agreed. It was the pdocs who had no family history and didn't want one which thought it was terrible.
I've long managed with things like staying out of heat, and if it is, keeping gatoaide, and if I feel faint, get inside and cool because the fluid balance doesn't anymore. I know that I get tired easy, and to quit before the real bottom hits. Meds however were the problem child. I've learned lots of ways to manage fluid balance and salt intake, but pills with a hard coating were usually useless. I'd loosen capsules but they didn't work right that way. Telling a pdoc about this usually made them impatient and of course they didn't listen.
What I still don't get how a pdoc who dispenses so many pills doesn't know anything about the absorbency of the drugs and ask if there's any problems with that, just assumes it all works perfectly. Otherwise, like with me, its either useless or instead of gradually effects you get slammed all at once. And when I did explain, it was brushed aside. I'd used up my ten minutes already. I eventually just took the bottle and added it to the other bottles I hadn't opened.
Before I moved, I told the doctor that I had pretty much weened myself off all of it, and was doing fine. The one I saw, who was also and MD, was actually pleased, but then he was more trained than the rest, it being the final appointment. After I moved I called the mental health place and ask if I wouldn't take meds if there was anything they could do. They said no. I didn't bother with them.
Pdocs complain that patients don't take their meds claiming they're too strong, making them bad patients. Patients claim that doctors don't listen to their concerns, and just add more pills. Patients who never complain may just be in such a stupor they can't put the words together. But this ISN'T doing right by their patient. Nobody does a medical evaluation to see if gaining 70 pounds is good for them, or if the drugs are compatable with pre-existing medical conditios. If anything, the PATIENT should be the one who decides if these things are something they are willing to risk.
Keep standing up for your friend. Maybe do some private research. Search for those fda approval reports with the side effects listed, and what drugs they react with. Get a clear idea what four new meds could do and if necessary, go with her with your research to see this doctor. She is lucky someone is looking out for her.
I searched online for potential causes of bipolar and came across this article, which unfortunately isn't recent. It proposes that BP might be the result of insulin resistance. This would certainly explain why obesity is strongly correlated to BP. The article even explains how lithium helps to counter the effects of insulin resistance on the brain. Maybe this is why so many doctors can't explain how lithium works. If they did, people would realize that mental illness is related to diet. I'm not saying you can just change your diet and cure BP. But if insulin resistance causes BP and if you can reverse insulin resistance through proper diet, then it would seem like a good place to start.
I searched online for potential causes of bipolar and came across this article, which unfortunately isn't recent. It proposes that BP might be the result of insulin resistance.
A mail order service that's in the business of providing products to people? I hope you don't believe everything that you read on the Internet.
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