Re: Pies, Water, Hot tub, family, therapy, oh my!
Posted by Zonie on August 29, 2021 at 19:11:19
In Reply to: Re: Pies, Water, Hot tub, family, therapy, oh my! posted by Wetnboy on August 29, 2021 at 18:04:06:
I see just about everybody else has had better experiences with mental health professionals than I have. Most of those I encountered I would be very happy to see in front of a firing squad. My own personal Dr. Josef Mengele was a pretty young psychiatric nurse-practitioner named Cathy Suchomel. She had a piece of paper signed by a judge declaring me to be mentally disordered and dangerous to myself and others, and she took that as a license to do experiments on me. She required me to take Risperidone and Geodon at the same time, and this caused me to have great difficulty staying awake at any time of day. I suspect it was only my size (I was 260 lbs at the time) that saved me from far worse effects. My mother looked up those drugs on the Internet and found that mixing them was contraindicated, and she had no medical training. If a common laywoman could find that out, Ms. Suchomel must have known better. My mother raised hell with the hospital and got it stopped. I shudder to think what is done to those who don't have relatives or friends on the outside to advocate for them.
In jail I was threatened with being declared incompetent to stand trial if I didn't keep taking Risperidone, but once I signed my plea agreement and was transferred to prison, I stopped taking it. I figured that being in prison there wasn't much more they could do to me if I was non-compliant. Last I heard they weren't executing people for refusing their meds. I noticed an improvement almost immediately. In the psychiatric hospital and in jail I had been sleeping about ten hours a night. In prison without that vile drug I was down to a more typical seven hours.
After I was released from prison I still had a term of probation to serve (I had pled guilty to two felonies), and one of the conditions was outpatient psychiatric care. Although my first probation officer was alarmed that I wasn't on any meds, for whatever reason the psychiatrists I went to see didn't try to compel me to take any. None of them were helpful though. They just asked the same fool questions over and over again and scheduled another session 90 days later at which the same thing would happen. None of them had the professional integrity to tell the Probation Department that I wasn't crazy and that they should remove that condition from my probation.
I did have one amusing encounter with one of them. They were changing psychiatrists very often, and there was no continuity of care. I saw one of them only once, but it was an interesting meeting. He was an elderly Polish immigrant, a Dr. Pieroczynski. Two things surprised him about our initial meeting: 1. That I could pronounce his name and 2. That I had mud on my boots.
If I could have had an evening appointment, I'd have cleaned up, but late afternoon was the only option, and the jobsite was an hour's drive away. It hadn't rained in two months, but given the dust abatement regulations, there was always a water truck going, so the jobsite was always muddy. I could stomp a little of the mud off my boots in the parking lot, but I didn't have time for a proper cleaning.
Dr. Pieroczynski was puzzled that a man of my academic qualifications was working as a common construction laborer. He was clearly used to the system in the old country. The People's Republic of Poland sometimes sent dissidents to the asylum, but they seldom forced them to change careers once they were released. After asking enough about my background and after I made it clear that I was there unwillingly and only as an alternative to going back to prison, he did ask one pertinent question. He asked if I was experiencing paranoia before my arrest.
I said, "There was fear certainly, but paranoia refers to an unreasonable fear. I think when one is ambushed at work by policemen with AR-15s, one's fears are confirmed." He gave me leave to go and schedule another appointment with a different psychiatrist in 90 days.
- Re: Pies, Water, Hot tub, family, therapy, oh my! Pete 02:02:13 9/03/2021
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