Mood:
don't askNow Playing: Dead
Topic: Psychiatry
Okay so we're up and running now. I ought to be excited but actually I'm depressed. I'm not sure whether I even believe in "depression" as an "illness" as such. I do suspect that too many Professionals have medicalized Unhappiness into so many subtypes and to such an extreme that almost any human behaviouf can be attributed to some newly recognized or relabelled psychiatric "disorder".
I say that what I have suffered from since childhood is Unhappiness. I've had some demoralizing encounters with psychiatrists, psychologists and counsellors. One of these prescribed for me (among a huge many other weird and wonderfully named concoctions) the antipsychotic Haloperidol: Take these tiny capsules three times a day and they might cause some muscle stiffness.
Some??! I'd only just taken my third dose and was minding my own business ambling up the road when my legs very nearly gave out from under me. I barely made it across the road to a pharmacy where I explained I'd taken Haloperidol. The pharmacist took one look at me and called an ambulance at once.
I was bundled on to a stretcher and from stretcher to trolley, my entie body twisting like a corkscrew. Then they left me in a cubicle. There I writhed for about an hour until the doctors came, shoved a canula in my wrist and gave me an IV hit of a drug used for Parkinson's Disease. I pity people with Parkinson's if that's the level of agony they suffer every day.
I was sent back to the psychiatrist with a stern letter advising never to prescribe such noxious stuff again.
My caring shrink never looked me in the eye. He simply wrote out a script for something else, asked the same monotonous questions about my mood and sent me packing without so much as an apology.
Psychiatrists go through at least 7 years' training to qualify -- only to succumb to a more severe form of the most basic prejudices we're all subject to. I.e. now that I'm called a Junkie my Problem is labelled Drugs. When I was in great distress but not a smackaddict the problem was named Depressed Mood and they prescribed drugs of their own more poweful than anything a street dealer could sell to you. It's a MY DRUGS -VS YOUR DRUGS situation. LET ME medicate you. But if you dare medicate yourself we will insult you within earshot, calling you and your kind deceptive and manipulative. And if we do ever listen to you, we'll hear what we've been trained to listen out for -- not what you're actually trying to say.
All common sense has been trained out of some of these "Professionals".
Tell you what, though; this rant has lightened the old mood a little. Ha!
There is heroin nearby but I'm trying not to take it. I'm broke and craving a drink and a ciggie. It's been raining so the dogends at hte busstop are too soggy to smoke. I could really do with a can of white cyder and a rollup.
Cravings are the Root of Unhappiness.
I'm reminded of one of the huge paradoxes of drugs -- that the heroin that can make you crave nothing else at all will, in the end, make you crave it more than anything.
No-one can ever explain to a nonaddict just what it is that addiction does to you. It's a sickness of the very soul. All I can repeat is the common mantra: Drugs really aren't cool; Don't end up like me.
