It’s been a while since i’ve written here but much has happened I can assure you of that.
You will notice I have charted my symptoms at the header of my blog. These are a month and a half’s worth of symptoms which have helped me immensely in the past few weeks.
It all started when I decided to chart my symtoms because I felt my psychiatrist wasn’t listening to me or understood how much I was suffering each day. I found a brochure for my local health centre that did counselling on the cheap so I thought I might give them a call. The health nurse gave me a 40 minute interview over the phone to see if I was eligible for counselling with the Centre. It turned out because I had bipolar disorder it was too complex for them and they referred me onto a GP in my local area who could refer me onto a psychologist and give me a mental health plan so I could receive the rebate from Medicare for my counselling sessions.
I made an appointment with the GP and told him I was not happy with my current psychiatrist because I felt he wasn’t listening to me and I wanted a referral to another one. He referred me to his mate in Brunswick who evaluated me for 50 minutes. I gave him my symptom chart. At the end of the evaluation he would not tell me his diagnosis nor discuss anything further with me except by saying “I think you have a type of bipolar disorder”. He insisted on speaking to my current psychiatrist and relaying his findings to him and suggested I keep with my current psychiatrist who knew my history and who I had been seeing for 2 1/2 years. I tried to squash out some information using my legal training but he was very tight lipped so I left totally confused and despondent.
My current psychiatrist subsequently telephoned me and said he had been contacted by this second psychiatrist and they had both agreed that I should reduce my dose of Zeldox by half to stop the shaking and music in my head. I did as I was told.
Reducing the Zeldox did not help with my shaking and I was still getting suicidal thoughts so I rang my current psychiatrist and told him it was not helping. He said “I can’t help you anymore, you have to check yourself into the hospital and they can assess you further from there”.
So off I went to see the Crisis Assessment Team at Sunshine Hospital where I stayed from 11.30am until 7.15pm that day.
At first I thought they were a bunch of idiots because the psychiatric nurse said to me “I can’t understand why your psychiatrist has sent you here”. I asked him had he rung my psychiatrist and he said his collegue had. I explained my symptoms and gave him a copy of my symptoms list.
He subsequently returned and conducted a full evaluation of my past history. It was then that he dropped the bombshell “I do not think you have bipolar disorder”. Freaking hell I thought, these people don’t know what they are talking about, how could it be that I don’t have it but i’ve been treated for it for 2 years. He asked me if I had any “highs” and I said no. From my symptoms list he did not see any evidence of me being psychotic. I told him that apart from the excessive spending incident listed in my symptoms list, I had never been psychotic. This was the basis for his diagnosis of depression and anxiety.
You cannot imagine the relief lifted from my shoulders when I was told that. I have left this post half done sitting in my blog drafts since December. I’ve never had the motivation to finish it until today.
I saw the head psychiatrist who also confirmed that she thought I did not have bipolar disorder. I was told to get off the anti-psychotics and go and see the CAT team psychiatrist in a few days for a full evaluation and find myself a psychologist. That was imperative after hearing my history.
I went and saw him and he also thought I did not have bipolar disorder. He was moving towards a diagnosis of depression and anxiety. He confirmed that I should come off the anti-psychotics and see a psychologist as soon as possible.
During my visit to the hospital and the CAT team psychiatrist I was shaking uncontrollably. I could not stop. I learned later from my psychologist that the CAT team psychiatrist was considering a diagnosis of tardive diskinesia – a shaking disorder associated with the use of anti-psychotics. While I have been off the anti-psychotics since late Dec 08, I still have a slight tremmor which was not in existence before I started taking Zeldox.
I am seeing a new psychiatrist now, he does not think I have bipolar disorder either.
Basically I have been incorrectly treated for bipolar disorder for two years. Had it not been for my symptoms list that I created I believe I would still be none the wiser and I do not know if I would be alive today.
Since coming off the anti-psychotics my everyday symptoms have dramatically reduced however I am still very troubled, angry and depressed. It is however better going through what I went through on Zeldox. I now often withdraw from my surroundings and entertain myself in my own little world. I have distanced myself from my partner and my relationship is feeling great strain. I go around with a miserable look on my face and snap at strangers who irritate me. These are all things that were not apparent in my life before I started taking Zeldox.
I believe the incompetence of my former psychiatrist has hampered my recovery and contributed to unnecessary pain and suffering and loss of the good things in life.
Perhaps some of you may think “How could she think she was bipolar when she had no highs or psychotic episodes?”. The answer is that I was a newcomer to bipolar disorder, I knew very little about it and had no experience with the illness. Every symptom I experienced I thought was the illness rather than a side effect of a drug. I was naive and ignorant and believed a diagnosis from a man with so many years experience in mental health.
I did confront my former psychiatrist in early January 09 about the conflicting diagnosis. He said to me “You don’t have bipolar disorder Lisa, you have depression”. What really disappointed me the most about his sudden change of mind about my diagnosis was that during one of my former visits to him he told me that just because I had a mental illness it didn’t mean I was slow or in any way incapacitated. I can do what every normal person can do he said. If that were the case, why did he try to pull the wool over my eyes in Jan 09 by saying I did not have bipolar disorder? Because he could and because he thought he could get away with it because I was mentally ill. He really didnt see me as a normal person after all.
After being an outpatient of the hospital for about I week I returned to work and got told i’d been made redundant. I do not believe I was made redundant to cut costs because in a firm of 400 employees, I was told by HR that only three people had been made redundant. It was a blessing in disguise really because I had always struggled to cope with the pressure associated with the job mixed with the continuing side effects of the anti-psychotics.
Now I have a new job with a lovely firm with no pressure whatsoever. It is a six month temporary contract but it is allowing me to slowly rebuild my life. I am never one to give up and I have reached out so many times to so many people for help but no one has been able to obliterate the pain and emotional turmoil I am going through.
The system has let me down.
