A reason to be sceptical of psychiatrists

Post Reply New Topic

Just been looking through my psych correspondence. There's a copy of a letter from my then care co coordinator to my pdoc where she mentions to him I've spoken several times about my balance and difficulty with practical tasks . She then goes on to say I know that dyspraxia is quite hard to diagnose(something I never said). That was back in March 2008. Well I got an additional appointment on the back of that where the pdoc asked a couple of irrelevant questions and then rather huffily dismissed the subject. The subject has never been raised again by a professional although I occasionally drop the words dyspraxic and dyspraxia into the conversation. It seems to me completely irresponsible and bad clinical practice that a pdoc would dismiss something as a possibility after a few questions that really had no bearing on the matter at hand. Even if they had been relevant I doubt a 5 minute conversation would have been enough to arrive at a definitive yes or no as to the possibility of dyspraxia. It's crap like that that helps people to be sceptical about psychiatry and the intelligence of psychiatrists.

I'm extremely sceptical about psychiatrists after my misdiagnosis, the doctor giving me wrong drugs and his strong confirmation bias that made him deaf for any signals suggesting that he might be wrong.
The psychs can ruin someone's life in 15 minutes if someone is vulnerable... and they work with extremely vulnerable people.

Would you trust an astrologist ? IMO psychiatry is a pseudoscience. I take everything one says with a pinch of salt.

My first psychiatrist was a little nutty, too. During our meeting, I told her about the anxiety problems I had, the worst among them being hypochondria. Taking down this fact, she asked about my medical history and, hearing that I'd had an MRI a few years earlier to check on things up there, she said nonchalantly, "Well, it's probably not a tumor causing these problems then." Probably.

My psychiatrist has never met with me for longer than fifteen minutes, has been prescribing me medications pretty much only usd to treat bipolar disorder but hasn't said a word to me about thinking I have it or anything (I'm not diagnosed with bipolar and don't think I have it), and when one of my medications was causing me to have horrible mental images of things like killing myself, when I told him about that, he increased the dose of my most recently added medication, which, as I suspected all along, was the one causing the issue, and I ended up in the hospital because the images were pretty much constant and I was seriously considering actually killing myself just to make them stop. Once I got off of that medication, the images stopped completely. So I don't trust my current psychiatrist, at least. I'm going to be switching to another psychiatrist soon, hopefully this one will be better

Good decision.

A psychiatrist may be reluctant to address dyspraxia because medication is of very limited use in treating the condition and their job is to prescribe medications. Stimulants, like Ritalin, can address deficits in focused attention, but that's about the extent of what drugs can do. Non-drug treatments are more frequently used, like occupational therapy, speech/language therapy, perceptual/motor training and the like. Have you tried pursuing those sorts of treatment?

I have a degree of dyspraxia myself - it was a lot worse when I was a kid. You should have seen me trying to play baseball in little league, lol I've overcome it to an extent for specific activities through repetition of the action. But when I try some new action, like dancing, I'm slow to be able to coordinate. With something like a video game, I'm quite clumsy to start, but eventually I become quite good and fast once the actions become ingrained.

I've given up totally on psychiatrists and medication. No medications have ever helped even slightly except for benzodiazepines and those are addictive and have a nasty withdrawal when you stop. Every antidepressant I've tried (out of more than a dozen) agitate me and produce bad anxiety, which they then want to add antipsychotics for, which mess me up worse. And the last psych doc I saw misdiagnosed me as bipolar II because I answered yes when asked about inner agitation and difficulty feeling happy or joyful, and now that is permanently in my medical record and keeps following me around. I was subsequently told by another doctor that I'm not BP II (I'm autistic), but you can't get that sort of misdiagnosis expunged. I've had a psychologist refer me to a center that had therapy for sensory processing disorder, but I've never had a psychiatrist recommend anything other than medication.

LOL....when I was 9 years old, it was decided that I shouldn't even play in Little League----not even in the minor leagues.

The above posters are right: it almost seems like the "therapeutic" aspect of psychiatry has been left to the wind. Nowadays, psychiatrists seem to be mostly about prescribing medications.

You may be better off having a psychiatrist handle your medications and having an actual therapist, counselor, or psychologist you speak with. I used to work in Behavioral Health before staying at home with my children and 90% of our psychiatrists classified their appointments as Med Evaluation - not counseling or observation. They are there to find out how your meds are working and if you're happy with them.
Also, it's trial and error. You may not develop a rapport with the first individual you are placed with.

Seems so, there is actually very little to psychiatry apart from the prescribing meds, and even that is not very complicated, most GP's or family physicians can do that job, it's not a specialised niche.

Honestly I've had nothing but good experiences with psychiatry. Maybe I just got lucky lol.

I wouldn't say pseudoscience, more like still in its infancy. It's about the brain and the chemicals in the brain, so I think it has some merit.
Psychology on the other hand is a pseudoscience IMO.

The problem is that so much of psychiatric evaluations come down to opinion, as do in all honesty, quite a few DSM criteria.

Another problem is that coupled with the mostly opinion part, they tend to be too quick to medicate. A bad shrink can do so much damage.

It's only prudent to take anything anyone say with a pinch of salt.

The problem I have with pdocs is that (a) they select bits of what you've told them to take on board and choose to dismiss/ignore the rest (b) they are often not intelligent enough to see you holistically as a whole person.

Precisely like the one who misdiagnosed me.

I've actually found a psychiatrist who can listen and think and who doesn't see me as a list of symptoms to match to some table or number of deficits... He treats me as a whole person who sometimes needs his help.
But I guess it is rare attitude.

Why do you say that psychology is a pseudoscience?