Okay, okay, I take it back. Er...alright I don't take it ALL back. But I did have a nice visit with my prescriber this week. I mention this in the wake of my last slightly aggro post about he and I parting ways but I should clarify a couple of things:
1) He's really actually a pretty cool guy.
2) I can see why, as a psychiatric services provider, he doesn't just jump to alter a course of treatment every time a patient comes in with some new-fangled idea.
3) We generally come around to mostly agreeing, eventually, even if I may be impatient. (But it IS hard to be patient when you are the one whose brain chemicals are inadvertently getting jacked around.)
I probably will be changing over to "maintenance" mode soon with my GP since we both agree that everything seems to be working fine for me...I just need to check in with him in about 6 weeks to make sure everything's really for real coolio. Oookey dookey.
IT IS HARD TO BE PATIENT regarding treatment. And I have had an exceptional amount of issues with medications. So...my previous post was accurate to my feelings at the time...and many of those feelings are still true. But I bother to write this "just short of a retraction" post, to illustrate that it IS important for we with the ADHD to acknowledge that we may be patience challenged at times. Having been me for a loooong time, I have learned that when I have BIG feelings about something or feel reactive about it, I simply need to mechanically put it on the backburner for at least a few minutes (or a few hours...or a few days) so that I can be sure that my reaction is based on reality, not on my momentary reaction.
It takes practice, but luckily there's a lot of ways to do this. You can say clever things like "I'll get back to you on that." or "Very interesting...let me think about that.". You can simply walk away if there's a polite way to do so (though sometimes you really just have to turn and walk even if it might seem a little rude to walk away...if it's the lesser of rude options and you feel something really sparky about to come out of your mouth). The electronic version of this is to begin an email in reply and then hit SAVE AS DRAFT instead of sending...then go back later and possibly revise before sending.
Regarding treatment...you should make sure to communicate with your therapist/prescriber/other. Ask them how long they think something will take, what you can reasonably expect to happen. And don't let people not answer your questions. And if you don't like their answers, then you can actually indulge your impatience just a little and get a second opinion. I find that I am able to mobilize patience more easily when I know the parameters...when I have at least a rough idea of what to expect.
So blahblahblah.
I think it's really great that there are people like you out there that tell it like it is. I myself have been down that road with few psychiatrists. I've been diagnosed with ADD, DID, and PTSD. I went through the paces with different meds and couldn't find a helpful combination. So, I decided to do my own research which I brought to my Dr. Apparently a bad idea. If I can research then I'm not mentally ill. My world is one big blah of dysfunction. Anyway, long story short, I now have to find yet another prescriber. ugh.
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