Klonopin

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California is known as “The Golden State” and some have called it “The Land of Milk and Honey.”

The Beverly Hillbillies noted that it was the home of “Swimming pools – Movie stars.”

That should be encouraging for people like my 27 year old, freckled, red-headed patient.   After all, he had a pool cleaning business. But he was nervous — really nervous.

He did not have full-blown panic attacks, though he certainly fit the criteria for generalized anxiety attacks. Sometimes he did get a “heart in the throat” kind of feeling; something which some people would have called a “truncated anxiety attack.” But he had a lot of them and they really didn’t cramp his style very much.

He did not sleep very well, confessed that concentration was poor, and had great difficulty trying to find any interest in collegiate academics. As a result, his grades suffered considerably. And while I could potentially chalk this up to him falling into a category of males who may be better equipped for trade school than an actual 4-year college (based on patience; not necessarily intelligence), I didn’t believe this to be his case at all.

This guy was anxious. Read more on Stuck On The Treatment Treadmill…

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It does not matter what country they were from. The father got into the system when his 19 year old son went stark raving looney bonkers and started destroying the homestead. Luckily it was an apartment in an urban setting, or I don’t think anyone else would have known about it. There was one older child who had already flown the coop, one wife who had died because the strain of leaving the old country had been too much. I had a feeling she had also gotten raped or something, but that was father’s post-traumatic stress disorder if anything. I told him to come back for himself, but I never saw him again. He swore on a stack of bibles that his son did not use drugs.  He said nobody had ever explained to him what was wrong with his son. At least no way he could understand and explain back to me.

For an American the solution would have been a support group, like the Alliance for the Mentally Ill. They lived in a rural area, though, and I did not know if the local chapter had anybody who spoke his language.  There is no way the patient could have handled that – and probably not the father, either. Read more on You Can’t Pick And Choose Which Medicines You Want…

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He looked more like the romantic hero from the era of Lord Byron than a psychiatric patient – he wore his hair longer than today’s style and he obviously pumped iron.  Indeed, I found out that working out was an important part of his life.

He was 28, and he had just been released from a two day stay at hospital and his medication was standard fare — Zoloft (sertraline) antidepressant.

I had no clue why he had to be seen by me on an emergency basis. It turned out he had been admitted to the hospital because he was uncomfortable about his roommate’s anger.  He had been concerned he might get “attacked.” I had no way of telling whether the roommate had an actual history of this sort of behavior or if this was delusional.  But the roommate was not the patient before me. “Just give me klonopin,” Lord Byron said. “Everybody else does.” Read more on Fixing The Problem Is Much Better Than Taking Addictive Drugs…

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