Thank you Hope for encouraging me to connect with my health professionals and reminding me that I have a valid medical condition.
I am sitting alone with a cup of tea thinking about how lucky I am.
I am so incredibly grateful for my doctor’s genuine care and concern, I know that he really cares about my welfare and isn’t just saying it, and I know that I am very lucky to have a great doctor.
I am someone who has moments of incredibly good luck in a life of terrible luck. I owe so much to the patients that came before me that suffered unnecessarily and were misdiagnosed with schizophrenia or another psychotic illness because the way that Australia trains psychiatrists is to get to the diagnosis as quickly as possible with very narrow categorical thinking. Trauma is not even a sub-specialty of psychiatry in Australia.
Something that has a lot to do with this is the location of where we diagnose people, which is the emergency room of public hospitals. I think that that in itself contributes to the brokenness of the mental health system and can destroy lives. They want you out the door as fast as possible and their stats down. It’s really scary.
My doctor told me there was one women in particular that taught him so much about dissociative hallucinations and dissociative psychosis that it was a turning point in his clinical training and it exposed the failings of the DSM and all that he has been taught. If it wasn’t for that poor women and other patients who were similar, no doubt, given my family history I would have been diagnosed with schizophrenia and placed on antipsychotics for the rest of my life.
My doctor said there was a women in hospital recently that reminded him of me, and that she’d been drugged to the eyeballs and was now having ECT and nothing was working. The doctor had made no enquiry about any trauma, CSA <10years, nothing, and just treated her as if she has biological schizophrenia. It makes me so, so sad that it has to be a lottery and it has to come down to pure luck.
I was reading about Darrell Hammond from Saturday Night Live and his experience of misdiagnosis, it was really interesting but scary too. Governments don’t want to operationalise complex personal histories & mental health conditions, we are left on our own, to patch together a medical team that has the clinical experience and clinical exposure to hopefully aid us in our recovery with what we have.
I also know in my heart of hearts that I have given %150 to the 11 years of continuous therapy I have done with my clinical psychologist and my psychiatrist and that I should be proud of how far I have come given the circumstances. I was so utterly devastated in 2016 when the doctor said it will take you 12-18 months to recover from this, it was supposed to be my turn after having moved back to care for my mother after my father’s suicide.
It is one thing to have a great doctor, but therapy is not a passive process and not for the faint hearted when you have so many dark experiences to sift through, it is up to the patient to participate and become comfortable with being incredibly uncomfortable.
I know that a lot of my recovery has come from me and the effort that I have put to build the therapeutic relationship that we now have, in and not merely from my doctor. You can have the best shrink or psychologist in the world but if you don’t actively participate and do the hard work you’re probably only going to tread water or regress.
It does have to be a holistic path to recovery unfortunately, there is no magic pill and it can be wearying to have self discipline 24/7, 365 days a year , but we can only do our best.
It’s taken my psychiatrist 3 years of weekly therapy to finally get to an understanding of my father’s personality disorder and the intricacies of his abuse and manipulations and the extent of his incredible lies. He fabricated almost his entire biography and if you ever caught him out on this, that was when he was his most aggressive, vindictive and violent.
For many years my father’s NPD had doctors believing he was complex. He really was not particularly complex at all and his child abuse was mild to moderate. His siblings said they could see personality traits at a veyr young age that pointed to NPD.
My father made people feel giddy, he was that full on, and making a doctor feel giddy was misinterpreted as a having come from a very complex childhood. He fooled a lot of people for many, many years, and being raised by him gave me insight into how malleable and vulnerable we can all become when living with a dictator in captivity, when middle class Australia is so willing to look the other way.
It will soon be 9 years since he passed and I am relieved to say that after almost a decade of recovery from his mind games I am finally free of a lot of the effects of his narcissism. I will probably always suffer from low self-esteem because of him, I am a naturally sensitive person, and I will always be susceptible to toxic people, but I know I have made huge noticeable and recognisable progress.
He doesn’t have the hold over me like he did for so many years. Maybe that’s why my subconscious mind was opening to my mother wounds, I have dealt with my father and done the hard years of therapy to break free from his spell.
I guess that’s what’s so fascinating about trauma and has world experts stumped, the biological and psychological effects of trauma, neglect and abuse, is not always proportionate to the effects on temperament and personality.
If you met my father you would assume he’d lived the worst of the worst. And he’d convince you he has!
He tried to destroy me and he failed miserably. He should have chosen a weaker target.
I hope that you are keeping toastie out in regional Australia Hope. Good luck with work, you are SO deserving and I believe in you. I’ll be cheering you on from the sidelines.
Keep warm,
Corny xx
