Lived Experience Forum

[QuietSoul]

Ivana, I had some brief dealings with the HCCC this year about my situation with the hospital and the psych, and my experience of them were that they were hopeless, they didn't even understand privacy 101 let alone issues of ethical or legal importance.  

However, one org  did deal with who i did find helpful was the Mental Health Coordinating Council.  I was put onto them through a friend who works in public mental health, and the MHCC is able to offer advocacy (eg people who can attend meetings iwth you or help you resolve issues/complaints you are having with mental health professionals).  Unfortuantely in my particular situation, the psych i saw wasn't technically part of that local mental health district, they were strictly employed by the hospital in some particular capacity, so it fell outside their ability to be involved.  Which is a shame because they would have been great, they were so helpful to talk to when i rang them.

Another mob is the Official Visitors Program, however they can only step in when you are an inpatient at a psych facility.

[QuietSoul]

Some one mentioned that the community should have a bigger role in addressing mental health, and someone else also said that it's society that is sick and not those who bear the brunt of its faults (i am very loosely paraphrasing here, so please correct me if i heard wrong...)

Firstly... i do think that more value is being placed on the role of community in mental health.  Think of the awareness campaigns, mental health week, the various initiatives, R U OK day etc.  But i do think people need to know when to direct a person to a professional... and again we come across the catch-22 that we have all experienced... 

Recently, i was in a situation where a friend who struggles with depression and anxiety was messaging me on Facebook.  She could be really needy ,and seemed to become attached to me very quickly and would say intense things to me with the intention to encourage and show love but i don't think she could see her own neediness, or her own want for me to say these things back to her.  One night she said she had been down lately, she asked me how i was, i said not great and that i am p*ssed off at mental health professionals at the moment but i would still tell others to see one if the were struggling.  Then she ended up saying all this dark stuff and got to a point where she said she was suicidal and was going to do something tonight and she wanted/needed to talk to someone.  It was close to midnight and i tried to direct her to Lifeline.  Cliche i know, but i can say my experience wiht them had been positive, and also they could refer her to other services as needed.  I also suggested her local mental health team, the Salvos Care Line, and the suicide hotline, but she said she wanted to talk to someone she knew.  (Hint hint hint: ME).  I told her i could not help her, that i was sorry but i could not talk to her, that i was not that great myself, that she needed to talk to someone with a mental health background given her situation and that i had work the next day and needed to sleep as i was heavily pregnant and had taken my night meds.  I felt callous drawing that boundary, but i am saying this because i feel that yes community does play a role and i am glad there is an increasing awareness and understanding in the community, but i can't be that person on the other end of the phone trying to negotiate with that person not to do that to themselves.  I tried to get her to agree to call someone, tried to get her to promise not to do it tonight, all she left me with was this cryptic but not cryptic message saying she would do it, and she wanted me to call someone.  And perhaps i should have, but i didn't.  She got through the night and got back on her meds and saw her psych again and is doing better now.  But we can't all be late night suicide counsellors, you know what i mean?  Awareness and support is one thing but we also need to know when to draw a line.  I couldn't help her and i couldn't be drawn into that.

The other thing mentioned above... about how it's society/the community that needs to change.  In a perfect world, absolutely.  I wish i could change it.  But the sad thing is... if we wait for another person to change, or a community, or society, we may be holding our breath til the day we die.  Even the psych profession.  Collectively, i would hope we can start something, start a conversation, write to someone important maybe.  But we can't change people.  I can't change my family.  I wish I could.  I can't change the messed up people who live and breathe around me that hurt people.  I can't change my workplace bullies.  It's true that this hellball and its people can be inconducive to good mental health at times.  On one of my bad days, it feels unbearable.

On my better days, i try to aim for resiliance.  There is a big focus on resiliance at the moment in the mental health profession.  That's at least one thing i can agree on with their current approach.  I just hope they don't use that as another reason for choosing not to address the cultural issues that are endemic in their profession (ie, that it's us that needs to "harden up" while some of them continue hurting people).

[QuietSoul]

But let's just say we TRY to change something, or start something that MAY (or may not) lead to change... and i feel there is interest and passion there and that i am not the only one in this boat... what would be effective?  How would you do it if you were tasked with it?  

Would you start a blog or website with people's stories?  Would you start some kind of lobby group or write letters to local MPs or prominent figures in the psych profession?  Would you write reviews on psych or hospital profiles online?  Would you start support or discussion groups for people in the same boat?

Just brainstorming here but am curious to know what others would do in an attempt to address the abuses of power that we can all relate to...

[chibam]

@QuietSoul, actually The Project did a segment some weeks back about how to bring about real change in whatever issue your passionate about. The #1 most effective tool they reccommended: getting the media on your side. Protests and letters to politicians aren't entirely useless, but getting some decent screen time is by far the most effective way to help your cause. Now exactly how one goes about getting the media to pay attention to them, well... frustratingly they didn't go into detail on that one. 😛

Incidentally, regarding your other post, I'm sure everybody can certainly understand and respect your dillemma regarding that facebook friend of yours. I didn't mean to imply that everybody ought to be at the beck and call of "mentally ill" people. I was merely suggesting that if there were minor things that individuals in the community could do to make a huge differance to the quality of life of someone suffering, they should maybe considder doing it. Frankly I think one of the first items on this list that qualifies is to simply stop speaking derogatorily about people. I mean is it really so much skin off someone's nose to give up whispering things like "there's something really wrong with her," or "she's a mess" to other people under their breath?

And yes, I realize that the major attitude and societal changes that need to happen will probably be very long in the making - probably too long to be able to make a significant chage to the lives of this generation. But we might as well get the ball rolling sooner rather then later.

[ivana]

@chibam,

I think its important,like you said,to first find out whether the "blame" is with the treating provider or whether it is problem of the Mental Health System at whole.

Also  i want to state that when im referring to compaining Im referring to Psychiatrists/other that are outright abusive,toxic,egotistical or abusing their power,im not suggesting complaining about Pychiatrists/therapists that simply didnt understand the patients problem well enough,or didn't admit them when asked,or didn't prescribe an effective medication etc.

Noones infallible but there is a large difference between infallible vs abusive.

You mentioned your therapist dished out misery and disillusionment from the system and society that she was a mouthpiece of.Would you mind saying in which way she gave you misery and why you feel it is a problem of the health system as opposed to personal problem (hers i mean)?

To use Quietsouls story as a example,suggests that wrongs were done both by the Hospital system and also by her Psychiatrist as an individual.

The Hospitals error was the breach of privacy.The Psychiatrists error was abusing her power and this is a personal wrong and not simply due to a broken mental health system.She abused her power by making it out that her compaint was due to a mental condition.What an easy way to avoid personal accountablity if someone complains:smileywink

Its very saddening and ironic that on one hand we have talk about ending mental illness stigma,that its not something to be ashamed of,that it makes the person no different from other people etc but then on the other hand we still have huge abuses of power that provide a conclusion that people with mental illness are less than other people,are defined by their illness,are not reliable sources,are not entitled to free speech and effective complaints processes and resolutions etc.

IE:when person/s with mental illness write letters to politicians or complaint to hospital its sometimes deemed to be illness induced-sometimes with the person/even being placed in a Psychiatric ward or jail,people with mental illness are still sometimes seen as not reliable witnesses by police when reporting crime/s,courts still use mental illness to discredit people or decide they are unfit parents due to it,and so on...

There is a system in place,both legal and unspoken,that favours the word of Psychiatrists/other providers over patients and sees them as more credible.

Im not for a moment suggesting thats how all Psychiatrists etc are,just that theres along way to go to truly remove these problems.

[Kate70]

Thanks @QuietSoul @chibam & @Appleblossom
I wandered over here seeking answers, and I think I have the beginnings of one.I too am very disillusioned with the western societal frameworks for clinical psychology, and am wondering whether theres an alternative situated within an eastern societal framework of collective self rather than the western individualistic self...For now, its off to acupuncture & taiko practice ;-)...

[chibam]

@ivana,

A lot to talk about here. Before I get to your main questions, you mention that a therapist not perscribing effective medication isn't a complaint-worthy matter, and I 100% agree with you on that note. As you say, no-one is infallible and I can appreciate that.

But my first main therapist (who was pretty disastrous in his own right, though not as bad as my really bad one) perscribed me some meds and those meds did absolutely nothing except make me fatter. As you say, perscribing dud meds on it's own is well within the realms of acceptable fallability. But the thing is that after several months of the treatment, I saw no positive change and I kept politely reporting this to my therapist, but he wouldn't listen. I kept telling him that I wasn't any better and he just kept ending the discussion by telling me that I "looked better". So I'm wondering if you would considder this failure to accept that medication isn't effective to be outside the realm of acceptable fallability? I'm inclined to believe it is.

Now, to the matter of my really bad therapist.

Warning: The following section may possibly be triggering!!!

"Would you mind saying in which way she gave you misery"

To summarize: When I walked in to her practice for the first time, my life was a wreck, but I had hope that it could be made worthwhile - I just needed a bit of direction on how to get there. When I finally got out 7 years later, my life was just as much a wreck, except now I had no hope - the hope had been stripped away by her, I'm guessing because she thought it was a "delusion", which are things that therapists are duty-bound to destroy as part of their job description. Ever since, my life has been nothing more then the long, long, long wait for cancer, heart disease or some kind of accident to claim me and rescue me from the otherwise inescapable emptiness. If you were going to ask "why don't I just take a more pro-active approach toward ending things?", well, she was very good at persuading me that if I suicided, I would be committing some grievous sin/crime against my family - I would be doing something awful. I have to continue to suffer if I wish to remain an honorable person. But people who die of natural causes aren't dishonorable, are they? Subsequently this would appear to be my only morally sound way out.

My most dearly sought dream has always been to find true love. I've had career ambitions, certainly; dreams of having proud personal accomplishments, dreams of having a life amongst a 'family' of close, treasured friends, and dreams of living in a better environment then I have for most of my life. But my first and foremost dream has always been to have a wife with whom I share a deep and loving connection. This was the most precious of many dreams that my therapist killed with extreme prejudice.

She was very quick to chalk up my lack of love to the fact that I'm not very wealthy. She made a point of hammering home the idea in me that no woman would ever be interested in me if I didn't have a reasonable amount of money. But consequently, if money is the determining factor between whether a woman will like me or not then really that woman doesn't care about me at all, the only thing she cares about is what's in my wallet. Essentially, this therapist made all women out to be prostitutes - people to whom love is a nonexistant or irrelevant concept, and who only engage in physical intimacy for financial gain.

Now this is where I think I'm gonna have trouble explaining things.

On one level, I like to believe that I know what she said isn't entirely true, that there are quite a few women with a genuine capacity for love; that there is someone somewhere for me who would actually love me and vice-versa if we got to know one another. But on another level, now whenever I look at or think about women or socializing, all I see is the ugly picture of women that this therapist painted for me. It's an ugly thought that I don't want to see, but I can't get out of my head. And thanks to having this ugly mental imagery dominating my vision, I feel like I've lost all interest in even trying to find my soulmate. It's like "if I look, all I'll ever see is a boundless sea of prostitutes and gold-diggers" and I just don't have the stomach to gaze upon such a disturbing, hopeless sight.

Part of me believes that women can indeed be beautiful souls, but another part of me believes that they are all just a bunch of generic, moneymaking vaginas. And that second, uglier part of me was put there by the therapist.

I'm so, so sorry if any of that mysoginistic stuff offends anybody. I really don't want to have those kind of thoughts but I do and I'm sorry.

On a similar note, when I told her that I never had any interest in "scoring" with random women, and that I'd actually rejected a couple of "easy" drunk women who had been all over me during some nights out that I'd had, she suggested that I might have some kind of hormone disorder! A claim which, by the way, medical tests she requested later disproved! I really got the impression that just because I'm a man, she expected me to be nothing more then a mindless peni$ intent on shooting it's load at anything with boobs and that the fact that I wasn't meant that there was something "broken" about me. Is it just me, or is there something obscenely screwy about a world where just about every sexual persuasion is perfectly okie-dokie, except if you are a man who only wants to be physically intimate with someone you truly love, in which case you've obviously got some kind of "medical/mental disorder" which needs to be treated?

Even in the lesser areas of my life, she tore me up like a natural disaster. She talked me in to believing that I had no hope of ever having anything better, career-wise, or in any other area of my life. "Acceptance" was a word that was used an awful lot in those sessions. Essentially, I was told to just grin and bear my unbearably poor quality of life, because I'm not aloud to leave it by my own hand. The thing that haunts me most about that therapy nightmare is the smug smile that was so often on her face. She knew my quality of life was unbearable. She knew I would rather be dead then continue to live the way I was/am. Her answer? "Acceptance." The therapist's perogative is to make the patient not commit suicide, regardless of whether they are still suffering or not. In this case, the therapist won, and she relished ever minute of that knowledge. Feel free to chalk that up to a patient's unreliable opinion if you must, but I know what I saw in her face.

"why you feel it is a problem of the health system as opposed to personal problem (hers i mean)?"

For one thing, in addition to the things I listed above, she also tried to talk me in to returning to certain parts of my life that I'd managed to escape from, that had only ever given me grief. Why? Because it was "normal" for me to do those things. Which just goes to show that the whole therapy was about moulding me in to the shape of another "normal" person, not about helping me get where I needed to be. The therapist was never on my side, she was only ever on the side of the general public who take issues with any and all of my abnormalities and wanted them ironed out so I looked, walked and talked like all the other "normal" and therefore respectable people.

For another thing, I've mentioned her attitude towards money in relation to romance & marriage above, but really this was just the tip of the iceberg. She was obsessed with money! She brought it up all the time. While I'm far from rich, my financial situation has always been much less of a concern then the numerous other pressing issues in my life, but it seemed to be just about all she cared about.

If you allow me to do a little bit of speculating, here's how I think she intended the therapy to work out:

First of all, she redefines the major shortfall of my life - my lack of love - as simply being a lack of having a vagina to have sex with. Then she convinces me that the way to get a vagina is to have lots of money, as I described earlier. It therefore figures that I would become someone who is obsessed with making money, as this would be my means of securely keeping a vagina around me, to fulfill my natural sexual urges.

On a similar note, every time I would express dissatisfaction with a political issue during our sessions, she would repeat her mantra "It's the people with the money who control the country/government.", as if to persuade me that the only way I could attack these political issues were to get rich and use that money to exert my influence on the world.

So why do I think that this quest to make me obsessed with money reflects a problem with the overall system instead of just her?

Listen to any given press statement a member of government gives when anything to do with mental health makes the news. Just about the first line they say in pretty much every statement they make on this issue is "Mental illness costs Australia ########### dollars every year..."

That's what this is all about to the system. Broken down "human resources" who aren't firing on all cylanders and are spoiling the efficiency of the economic powerhouse. The misery gripping the masses of so-called "mentally ill" people isn't a humanitarian issue, it's a financial issue. Because when a person is consumed by misery, they tend not to be fixated on making that precious money that fuels our precious economy. So what's the real goal of the system? Get them obsessed with making money again! Just like all the other commendable superstars of our economic machine! And if their misery is still present, despite their outward obession with moneymaking? Who cares? That's their problem! Their raking in the dough and funneling a large chunk of that into our tax system, so we're getting everything that we want out of them! Problem solved!

All my time in therapy was ever about was turning me in to what the system wants people to be. Not about having my needs heard. Not about giving me directions on how find what I'm looking for. It was all a course in play-acting, to get me to be play a role that suits the system's tastes but not my own.

[ivana]

Thanks for sharing Chibam.

Sorry you had that experience with that therapist.

What seems really obvious is that all those things that the therapist said to you were actually a reflection of her life,her outlook and her mentality.

For some reason though you believed it/internalised it but believe me it has nothing to do you with and your capabilities.

While she  may have been money focused,theres many many women (including myself) who are not gold diggers obsessed with the amount of money a guy has.

The sad reality though is that there are no character tests to go into the profession of Psychiatry and some go into in for many wrong reasons (ie:the high pay,ability to control another person,or even to workout there own issues etc).

[Appleblossom]

Hello @chibam

Sorry you had to go through that. Attitudes like you described deepens the divide between the sexes ... and we all, both sexes, suffer from those nasty stereotypes. We dont need it ... there are many women who are put off by men who are money mad ... I am one. YAWN. Economic materialism is a problem.  I am sorry that you stayed in a situation that becomane toxic for you ... I have done similar things.

It is why I say it is important to realise that doctors and therapists are human and flawed. Therapy rooms are not places for the govt to subsidise people unloading their bigotries ,,, on innocent and vulnerable people. It is not therapuetic.

I did laugh at Fay Jackson's little quip on tonight's Q & A as to who had the most insight about her ability to work... obviously not her doctor.

Yet good doctors are worth their weight in gold. I hope it doesnt happen again.

[chibam]

@ivana, @Appleblossom Thank you for your kindness and understanding. That was not easy to get out, but your responses have made an uncomfortable effort less uncomfortable. Again, I must apologize if the mysoginistic tone was hurtful.

"For some reason though you believed it/internalised it but believe me it has nothing to do you with and your capabilities."

It's funny. From the moment she started saying those kind of things, I tried to block it out of my mind because I knew they were bad thoughts, but I guess they just got a foothold and managed to burrow into my mind like a parasite.

There's this line in "Silence Of The Lambs" where Scott Glenn warns Jodie Foster: "Don't tell him anything personal. Believe me, you don't want Hannibal Lecter inside your head." I've seen that movie heaps of times. But all too late, I realized that's not just a warning against Hannibal the cannibal, it's a warning against any number of therapists.

"While she  may have been money focused,theres many many women (including myself) who are not gold diggers obsessed with the amount of money a guy has."

"there are many women who are put off by men who are money mad ... I am one. YAWN. Economic materialism is a problem."

Thank you both. 🙂 Like I say, it's difficult to explain. Like, I know what you are saying is the facts of the matter, but then there's like this other side of me - i don't want to call it intuition, but perhaps more superstition - that feels like all I will ever be able to see is the world she described.

I guess it's like fear of flying. You can be extremely well informed - know all the statistics about air travel being saver then driving and know about all the amazing safety features built in to modern planes, but then there's this other thought pattern, much more powerful then your rationality, that convinces you if you get on the plane something terrible will happen to you.

Likewise, I know the thoughts my therapist conjured about women and love are silly. But they are in my mind and they are, unfortunately, quite powerful.

"Sorry you had to go through that. Attitudes like you described deepens the divide between the sexes ... and we all, both sexes, suffer from those nasty stereotypes."

I couldn't agree more. Emma Watson gave a very impressive speech to the UN some months back addressing this kind of thing. It got a lot of attention and praise, which, we can only hope, means more attention and mindfulness towards trying to bridge this divide.

"I did laugh at Fay Jackson's little quip on tonight's Q & A as to who had the most insight about her ability to work... obviously not her doctor."

I watched it too and I loved that little irony she revealed. She is certainly an inspiration, accomplishing all she has, in spite of her illness. My only worry is that she will only (or mostly) be an inspiration to people who are mentally ill, when what she should be equally as much is an inspiration to all the therapists out there to believe that their clients are capable of accomplishing things.