Filed under End Of Life, News by on Oct 18th, 2013. Comment. 
I enjoy having friends, like just about everyone does. But that’s not why I’m in this business. When a patient needs help, I will do my best for them every single time. And if a few colleagues get bruised egos along the way, so be it.
She was a 53-year-old woman, but I don’t think she even would have liked to hear me to refer to her as a woman. We’re talking about someone who was short and stout and wore the kind of cap one would expect to see on a newsboy during World War I. She wore a very male looking zipper jacket, and told me she had the name of the other woman to whom she had dedicated her life tattooed on the back of her neck.
Regardless of all this, her face was red and she was crying. She told me she was chronically suicidal and never thought about anything else. Despite being medicated, her depression seemed to have gotten worse. Read more on What is there to Treat?…
Filed under Diagnosis, Disease, Doctors, medicine, News, Psychiatrists, Psychotherapy by on Oct 2nd, 2012. Comment.
All right — I am married to a man I love and I dearly love my profession. So how could a “boy she has it all” woman like me possibly get depressed?
Mine didn’t look exactly like the criteria laid out in the DSM-IV. I mean, I am not going to sit around for two weeks feeling this way just so I can meet criteria. But other than the two-week bit — I was depressed. I did not want to do much of anything except cry. I could not believe the negative thoughts creeping into my consciousness and I was having a hell of a time pushing them out. I felt sleepy, listless, the whole nine yards.
I did not prescribe myself an antidepressant. I do not think that anybody really believes at this point that a congenital lack of antidepressant has made anybody depressed — ever. Read more on Things to Consider Before Reaching for Antidepressants…
Filed under depression by on Jun 14th, 2012. Comment.
I have gone with my beloved husband in the last couple of weeks to a few venues so clearly classified as “dive bars” that I have searched in vain for a depth gauge on the wall. The treasure we seek – karaoke. These establishments are not the province of the landed gentry, and we are generally as out-of-place as a fish in a cloud. The treasures we find unperformed songs in the depth of confused directories whose organization defies even an amateur cryptologist (me). Read more on Karaoke As A Mental Health Program…
Filed under Psychology by on Jun 21st, 2011. Comment.
Although I had been offered some academic scholarships after a pretty distinguished high school career, my parents had a great ritual. After formally declining them, I had to save and overlap (and trim) all of the letters and put them in a frame for the living room wall.
The idea of actually accepting one of them — they were all pretty far from the greater Boston area where we lived — never even came up. As a precocious over-achiever, I had skipped a couple of grades and was only 15. They told me I was too young to even think about such fantasies as going to a university.
I’m glad that I had parents that loved me so much and worried about my well-being. But gee whiz – I don’t think Doogie Houser had over-protective parents.
Anyway, it was two against one, and I was still a minor and financially dependent upon them. There was a non-negligible scholarship, a work study program, and numerous considerations from one of Boston’s fine local universities. My mother dropped me off at classes and picked me up, since student parking was both expensive and difficult to get.
Of course I never really “felt” like a freshman. I managed, with some difficulty, to convince my mother to either drop me off early or pick me up late. I needed to meet colleagues. All I really cared about academically were the necessary prerequisites for medical school, in terms of courses or grades, but I knew I was in the middle of a rich, seething subculture of the youthful.
There were some activities I would never be a part of, like dating the football team or being a member of a sorority. Types like me did not do those things. But I was so fascinated by large number of people whose age was somewhere near mine. I walked up to them and shook hands and said “hello,” whether they sat on the stoop in front of the chemistry building or in the television lounge at the Student Union. Read more on Student Stresses Are Mental As Well As Financial…
Filed under Stress by on Apr 14th, 2011. Comment.
I was commissioned a captain in the United States Army in a northern Midwest city. The physician who examined me before I took the oath was senior and experienced and as avuncular as they come.
He said the most interesting people (and far and away the smartest) he got to meet in his life were commissioned women. The one he had seen before me was a woman who had been a professional musician, a clarinetist I think, and was going straight to Wahington, D.C. to play in a dance band at the White House. He told me about women rocket scientists and others. Me, I figured I was only a doctor, a half-trained neurosurgeon. As a generalist he felt somehow he needed to show me enough respect. He really didn’t want to do a physical, so he did a cursory and discrete one, and I asked him about being a civilian physician attached to the military. In particular, I asked him about neurological and psychiatric screening. Although he told me he knew how to do a pretty detailed neurological examination, he said he never had to do one. Anyone with that kind of illness would, he thought, be likely to be screened out long before. After all, these were generally healthy young men. Basically, the most important part of the examination was checking them for hernias. Read more on Military Mental Health — A Contradiction?…
Filed under News by on Apr 6th, 2011. Comment.
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…
Filed under Addictions, Substance Abuse by on Oct 8th, 2010. 1 Comment.
One of my special shrink magazines had a story headlined: “DUI offenses may signal untreated Bipolar Illness” in the November 2009 issue.
Since you have to sign up for a free account to read the article, and since they prefer you be a mental health professional, I’ll just tell you about it.
I don’t think you have to have twenty years of medical school and psychiatry training to reach the conclusion that anyone who has DUIs — especially a bunch of DUIs — should be screened for bipolar disorder. This radical conclusion was reached by Dr. Mark J. Albanese of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues report. Read more on Dual Diagnosis — Two Ways To Describe One Thing…
Filed under Diagnosis by on Feb 2nd, 2010. Comment.