Lived Experience Forum

[BillyGoat]

Wow - lots of good advice from lived experience there.... thank you to everyone who replied.

I'm done with pdocs, sorry, psychiatrists, now. I'm living in Cairns in FNQ, and the 12 or so I saw in my recent 5 month stay in hospital, and the 5 or so I've dealt with since, through the hospital Continuing Care Team, have been embarrassingly misinformed and inexperienced.

When one of the student dicks I had an appt with in hospital tried to put me back on antidepressants, I argued with him for a week, asked his supervisor if he was comfortable with the recommendation then told them both about the professor of psychiatry I got my diagnosis second opinion from, who took me off AD's and told me he never prescribed them to BP patients because they more often caused harm than help.

The response was "I don't believe you, I wasn't taught that at school" so I told him to get out his phone, Google "bipolar disorder antidepressants" and read out the paragraph that came up before the list of suggested websites.

He looked surprised, but still put me on some AD's, and was stunned when a week later I went hypomanic.

Pdocs up here, in my experience, are badly educated, misinformed and unable to be told when they're wrong.

My gp is now prescribing meds for me, and I'm about to try to reconnect with the tdoc, sorry, psychologist, that I was referred to about 6 months ago. Haven't seen him since before Xmas, as my leg got buggered up again, and walking to him was too difficult, but now it's time again.

I'm still not sure about him, I'm yet to decide if he can help me, or he just wants to learn from me, but it's too early to write him off just yet.

Again, the best knowledge I've gained, the most understanding I've received and the most help I've gotten has come from other people who live with the illness - who have thought about, battled with and tried to understand how to deal with it.

That's you guys.

Again, thanks for the interest and responses to my posts, I look forward to slowing myself down on the thread and learning from your experiences and thinking about this bastard illness. You're the best chance I got of getting my head around it all.