antipode
Posts: 1787
Joined: 4/19/2004
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quote:
can't find somebody I trust enough
And another thing: a therapist (and in your case, psychiatry would probably be the right specialism, I'll come back to that) is somebody you pay for professional advice, and to be a sounding board. It is someone with whom you don't have an emotional relationship, who operates under a code of conduct, and who has no stake in you, other than to eventually file you away as "another problem solved". One of the problems some patients have is that they don't "work" with their therapist - i.e., they don't provide the therapist with the tools and information the therapist needs to understand the patient.
I can give you a perfect example of a situation where a psychiatrist doing group therapy was beneficial: me. I came out of my teen years with a problem, or so the medical profession thought: I was majorly screwed up because I had been brought up by parents with problems, an abusive father, and all this was blamed on the fact that both my parents spent part of WWII in Japanese concentration/POW camps, where they lost their two children, my older siblings, then to lose their colonial home and being repatriated to "the old country", so to speak.
That is how I was treated, and there was a general consensus among the medicos that I had a psychiatric/neurose problem.
I eventually ended up in group therapy with a psychiatrist. It wasn't until, I think, my third year of therapy that he began to distinguish a pattern in my behaviour that he thought might be physical, not mental, and he kept encouraging me to see medical doctors, get second opinions, etc. A pre-eminent orthopedic surgeon had already sent me home with a handful of valium, opining this was all psycho-somatical. An unfortunate side effect of the valium was that it is a muscle relaxant as well as a tranquillizer, I responded well to it, and that was interpreted as proof that I was mental.
Becaue the shrink kept insisting that there might be a physical "hidden" complaint, I eventually ended up seeing my (now ex-) wife's orthopedic surgeon - she took me there not knowing what else to do, he being the doctor that did corrective sports surgery for her and many of her colleagues (she was a ballerina). What neither of us knew was that he was a rheumatologist as well - he took one look at my x-rays, taken three years earlier, after a rather massive car accident, and said: "Hah! They missed something!".
It turned out my shrink was right - I was suffering from an immune condition that likely was caused by the genetic damage my parents sustained during their incarceration in WWII - so while I was classified as a second generation war victim, the problems weren't psychological, but physical. This immune condition was what was causing my problems, and the resultant "neurosis". While incurable, the symptoms can be treated, and I moved on from there to move to the UK, and later to the US, get medical treatment that continues to this day, mostly medication and physical therapy, and I went on to build a successful career in the telecommunications industry.
The diagnosis was re-established every time I moved countries, which is how the medical system works, so there isn't a doubt: it is what it is, immune conditions are often hard to diagnose, as all there may be is a bunch of symptoms, and a genetic marker.
What I learned, and what is important for you to understand, is that medicine is not an exact science. With complicated symptoms, and especially with multiple conditions (I have three, two triggered by the original genetic misfire), it is very hard for physicians to establish what is what. There are many things they have to infer, can't find even by opening you up.
The observation here that you are not in the center of medical research may be very valid - but you can help yourself there by talking to your insurance, asking for a second opinion at a medical research establishment that has these specialisms - I have, since my original diagnosis, made sure that I got treated in "medical hubs" - London, NYC and now Washington, D.C., where, as it turns out, many physicians have unique experience as they spent part of their careers in the military, and have been exposed to lots of stuff the average specialist never gets to see.
I am going on about this just to emphasize that if you can't find a specialist you can live with where you are, try and get assessed in one of the major centers. A specialist in NY, LA or DC who teaches can often refer to someone in your neighbourhood that trained with them, and that in turn makes the treatment much easier, as doctors pay attention to those that taught them, and they see each other at conferences and seminars.
Hope this helps....
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RE: psychological issues are ruining my relationship - 
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