Psychiatrists and Car Mechanics

 Psychiatrists are like car mechanics who don't know how to drive—they've never actually used what they give to us people with mental health issues to purportedly "fix" us. They are like car mechanics who never felt their foot depress a gas pedal or allowed a steering wheel to ease back into the straight ahead position after a turn. Such car mechanics may very well know what books say about cars, but they have no idea what it is like to operate one. They don't fix cars from experience, but from what they have been told.

Psychiatrists, I have found, are woefully naîve about medications, particularly when it comes to side effects and withdrawal. Sometimes, I think they are willfully naîve. I say this because they dismissed me and refused to listen to me when I tried to tell them about side effects and withdrawal. I guess they believed the books and classes they took more than they believed the evidence of my own body. Their body certainly couldn't tell them anything.

When I think of all the strange side effects I've had because of medication, the strangest would have to be the central sleep apnea I got from high doses of Depakote. In central apnea, you stop breathing while sleeping not because of airway constriction, but because the brain stops telling the body to breathe. I had this for about ten years, and had to use an expensive bilevel breathing machine while I slept. After they took me off Depakote because it was causing ammonia build up in my blood, it was found at my next sleep study that I only had mild obstructive apnea, and no central apnea. Why didn't my psychiatrist clue in to what Depakote was doing to me? When he saw I had this extremely unusual disorder, why didn't he consider side effects? Because he was a car mechanic who didn't know how to drive. He was willfully naîve and ignorant about what these pills he was prescribing can do.

Withdrawal from medication is another area where psychiatrists could use some schooling from people actually experienced with taking these medications. More than once, from a variety of psychiatrists, while suffering from withdrawal, I have been told that "the med is completely out of your system by now." The assumption is that once the med exits your system, your system does not then need to get used to not having it. Psychiatrists should be asking us about this, not dismissing out suffering. Sometimes I feel as if psychiatrists have sneered at my suffering because they dismissed me as a "crazy" person who doesn't know what he is talking about. Apparently, their books that taught them about withdrawal, or lack thereof, are the real experts.

In many ways, psychiatrists are operating blind. They don't know what these drugs feel like. They don't even know how they work, although they have some ideas. They certainly don't know what it feels like to come off them. They only know what they've been told by med school and articles in arcane journals. In my experience, they pay more attention to these sources than to the actual suffering of living and breathing people—their patients. If they paid attention to us instead of what their books tell them is the truth, they would not have let me needlessly suffer with central apnea for ten years.

I imagine some psychiatrists are not like this, but I have yet to meet a single one. They don't know how to respond to actual suffering because they have little personal experience with serious mental health issues and the strong drugs used to treat them. They think they know more than they do. They are like a mechanic who tells you how the book says your car should run, while dismissing your own report of what's going on.