More stuff [Psychopharmacological geekery, my diagnosis, Mixed States]
Sunday, April 27th, 2008These mayonnaise posts might be annoying from the point of view of the reader and sure hurt my googleability and reader attention, but there’s so much context involved in most post and it’s kinda tiresome introducing it as-needed, not to mention forcing anyone who really wants to understand this story to decipher through the breadcrumb trails scattered over short-ish, this-is-now posts.
My psychiatrist. My psychiatrist is a psychopharmacology geek who has studied under who he consider his Master, a psychopharmacology geek from Spain. I mean, he went all the way through med school, but he still holds a special place to this Master.
What being a psychopharmacology geek means is that we’ve gone through a lot of meds trying to optimize my experience. Most psychiatrists will give you lithium or Depakote and expect you to cope — actually bullying you into coping and keep taking your meds — and while that does work wonders, statistically — as in preventing relapse for N weeks, where N is a function of the size of your research grant, I for one know that I would have lost a lot in life if I had been in Depakote monotherapy, even if that meant avoiding a few hypomanic flip-outs.
He’s actually cool with me doing some psychopharmacological experimentation — not taking other people’s drugs, I guess, though I never had the chance, but fiddling with my doses in general and being discretionary about my clonazepam and ritalin in particular. I did earn his trust by being responsible, extremely well-informed and being fantastically aware of my moods so psychopharmacological experimentation can lead to optimal experience. I think he’s glad I don’t have major psychological issues that interfere with him being a psychopharmacology geek working with psychopharmacological optimization.
