Psychiatry

Though it has hurt others, there’s no denying it’s been helping me.

⚠️ Warning: discussion of death and suicidal ideation.

I’ve had friends severely hurt by psychiatry. They’ve had their lives ruined. The danger of death was exacerbated instead of alleviated like it’s supposed to. For a friend of a friend, it guaranteed death.

Psychiatry has a long way to go. The psychiatric doctors themselves often dismiss or pathologize every little idiosyncracy which strips patients of agency. People get thrown from provider to provider and get re-diagnosed over and over for years, undergoing trials of a myriad of drugs for a significant portion of their lives.

As Dr. K put it, mental health is the final boss of healthcare. It’s seems dead last of the things we’ve developed. We in the present world are frustratingly incompetent with what feels like the most basic things in mental illness and disabilities.

Because of all that, I grew mistrustful of psychiatry. I was resentful of the idea of being made worse instead of better. But my mental health continued hurting my ability to simply exist. And others who have heard my experiences with life encouraged me to get checked.

I hit a point where I knew I had to do something, or I would just die. So I tried the psychiatry I swore off.

I got medicated on lithium carbonate for bipolar disorder.

I was skeptical because of the side-effects, but was put on a low dose. I thought, if this fucks me up, the alternative is fucking dying anyway. So I stuck to it.

I’ve been on lithium for nine months now. And–somehow–I feel like a normal person. Things that are supposed to be easy, simple, mundane tasks are no longer painful, frustrating, depressing things. I think it’s actually saving my life. And stranger, I actually have a will to fucking live. I have hope. I look forward to things. I can actually feel gratitude instead of feeling like an ungrateful bitch.

Now my tentative success story doesn’t erase all the destruction that the nascent institution of psychiatry wreaks. But it does give more nuance. If you seem backed up to a wall, maybe you should try it out. But it’s probably best to be diligent and research everything your provider tells you to do. The moment you feel you can’t trust them, I’d say swap.

Take care. You deserve to feel better.