tf_talk | Gloves Off

http://tf-talk.dreamwidth.org/272.html?thread=460048#cmt460048

DA in reply to this: http://tf-talk.dreamwidth.org/272.html?thread=460048#cmt460048

I'd say the innocent explanation is that skipper!anon was just excited to have something to say and didn't realise how they've been coming across by repeatedly plugging bipolar because of the med-skipping, and won't bring it up again now they know how they've made other anons, and one of the caps, feel.

I've also been getting skeeved the fuck out by them, but I'll reserve judgment and wait to see if they're so invested as to bring it up again.

NA

I have an anecdote about bipolar people who don't take their meds. My shrink sometimes gets phone calls during our sessions about other patients of his. Once, it was the distraught mother of a bipolar woman who had once again gone off her meds, disappeared for a few days, been picked up by the police after creating a public disturbance, and sent to the emergency psychiatric ward.

He explained to me that he has several patients to whom this happens regularly: they are all either bipolar and/or psychotic (but they are only a *small minority* of his bipolar or psychotic patients!), they all keep making the mistake of thinking, "I'm fine now, I can stop the meds", and they all end up in the emergency psychiatric ward sooner or later, when either their family gets them committed against their will, or they get picked up by the police for creating a public disturbance somewhere.

Notice the part about repeatedly ending up in the psych ward? That's what's missing from Andy's life, and that's one reason I know for sure he's neither bipolar nor psychotic.

AYRT

Yeah, personally the anon is bothering me not because I believe there's no bipolar patients out there who skip their meds, but because it's clearly the same person bringing it up over and over again /despite/ loads of people pointing out to them why he doesn't match their ~diagnosis.

also, like, all kinds of people skip medications in not well-thought-out way

(my grandmother especially likes lowering her blood-pressure dosage, which drives her cardiologist up the wall)

this is like, an universal human phenomenon, and not like something only ~unresponsible bipolar people~ do

(just personally, I have unwisely stoped SSRIs (ouch), antibiotics, blood-pressure meds, stomach meds... etc. people are stupid it does not necessarily mean anything by itself)

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

(Anonymous) - 2015-04-22 18:34 (UTC) - Expand

From the child of a psychotic, I can echo that hard. It's actually a frequent feature (or, um, bug, but pretty much the whole disease is a bug, so...) of schizophrenia. One symptom of the disease can include an legitimate inability for the sufferer to recognize/understand/remember that they're sick. So ironically, finding a very successful combination of meds to treat other symptoms can make this one worse. Which leads to less taking of meds, which leads to the other symptoms getting worse again, which leads to a voicemail from Mom's nursing home saying she's been admitted to the local psych ward again. (Now. In my youth, it meant watching the ambulance show up in our driveway after weeks of her cognition deteriorating and the occasional discovery that she'd gone missing in the middle of the night.)

Oh, Anon :'( *hugs if you want them*

I hope your mother is doing ok now.

As a person who has psychotic episodes (from organic brain disease, rather than schizophrenia), I can also attest to this. I had episodic psychosis around times where my brain disorder was more intense, and I thought that there was nothing wrong in the fact that I kept thinking people were "staring me in the face too long", or that I felt people were paying an inordinate amount of attention to my presence. Like, in a creepy, weird way, not in the "oh shit look at all of these people watching me be fabulous, way".

Only until I started meds for my brain disorder (years after its emergence) did I realize that I was having some pretty fantastic persecutory delusions. And at no point during these psychotic episodes did I ever think I was wrong or overthinking things, or that I could be sick.

Now I'm on meds for the disorder, it stops psychotic episodes pretty much as well.

There's a real sense of evolution of psychosis when you're a sufferer who's been treated, the kind of narrative that Andy totally lacks.

NA Yeah, this. An acquaintance of mine came off their meds too fast when changing onto a new one, and became convinced that people they knew were plants that ran on electricity and were taken to hospital when they went to the police about it. Antipsychotics are useful if they work for you, but they aren't something you stop and start taking willy-nilly. Aside from the original symptoms coming back, there's the issue of discontinuation effects, which can be fucking awful. And if you ration your meds, you run the risk of being in an on-off loop of really bad side effects: first withdrawal, then your body has to get used to it again, then withdrawal, then on then off, etc. all while being under a therapeutic dose. You're supposed to take that shit on time for a reason. Funny how that's never come up.

Side-effects *in general* never come up. AFAIK, he's never mentioned any side-effect to his meds interfering with his life. Now, granted, he could be one of those lucky few who don't experience any seriously bothering side-effects from their meds. But considering how strongly psychotic he's supposed to be, and thus how high the doses would probably need to be to keep his psychosis at bay, how likely is it that he wouldn't suffer from ANY serious side-effect?

...While I don't doubt this can happen when psychotic/bipolar individuals can go off their meds, this sounds like either a doctor pissing all over doctor/patient confidentiality, or bullshit.

You'd have to be able to link an actual patient to the story for to violate HIPPA.

AYRT

Since he gave me no way to identify who he was talking about, how was he breaking any confidentiality? He's allowed to talk about his patients in general. He's just not allowed to identify any of them.

It may well work differently for doctors or psych professionals, but my mother's an ER nurse in a large American city, and the way it works for her was that she can tell outsiders details (so we got disgusting stories over dinner on the regular), or she could say names. She couldn't, however, do both. So if John Doe, Famous Actor, is in a hospital after a car accident, you can call the hospital and say "Is John Doe a patient there?" and they can answer yes or no, but if you say "What are John Doe's injuries?" they can't tell you that.

The closest she got to violating this was the time she treated the victim of a crime that made global news, and she had to get it off her chest because the details were so disturbing. Even then, she didn't say the person's name, it was just that the circumstances of the case were such, and the story was so widely publicized, that there was really no question who it was.

The case anon describes above, of a doctor sharing details of a patient who just called, does seem a bit shadier -- if the doctor took the call in the same room and you recognized the voice on the other end of the line, for instance -- but in general, my understanding is that it's ok for a doctor to share, in broad strokes, information about one patient with another so long as there's nothing that can identify them.

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

(Anonymous) - 2015-04-21 13:46 (UTC) - Expand

This is one of my biggest peeves with Andy. Like, if you're going to claim something as involved as any kind of disorder with a psychotic element, the least you could do is fucking research it. He's so goddamn lazy that he keeps just throwing in these, "eeeeeh and fuck it I guess a hallucinatory bear???" type comments.

With every thing else, Andy is incredibly dense about how to emotionally convey something like personal experience with something that is pretty terrifying. I would never joke about my delusions or hallucinations, and no other person who I know who also has a psychotic disorder jokes the way he does about them, either.

And he takes a group of people whose illnesses virtually divest them of a productive voice in society, and co=opts their narrative to fucking abuse other people. It makes me so angry I want to throw up.

Hell, even if he just went some way to acting like he had the limitations of the real thing. It wouldn't satisfy me, but it would at least be some sop to reality.

he takes a group of people whose illnesses virtually divest them of a productive voice in society, and co=opts their narrative to fucking abuse other people

I wonder how much of it is a coincidence. If someone tried to use depression or anxiety, for example, to justify such large-scale abuse, there would be many BNFs suffering from those illnesses who could speak up and call this bullshit out.

But how many BNFs with psychosis do you know? As far as I know, I personally don't know any (it's always possible I know a psychotic BNF who simply doesn't talk about their psychosis, of course). And considering the kind of mistruths and myths about psychosis which keep being mentioned in both canons and fics without ever being called out, it's pretty clear that fandom as a whole doesn't know and doesn't care about psychosis.

I wouldn't be surprised if Andy was purposefully banking on that ignorance and disinterest.

ayrt

I think it was a happy coincidence for him. He seems to be more invested in portraying himself as the long suffering woobie, with More Hurt Than You. Schizophrenia as a disorder tends, at least in common perception, to trump other illnesses in terms of severity because of its manifestations.

Then he realized that p much anyone else with a psychotic disorder is unlikely to speak against him for a variety of reasons, so up until quite recently, he's been enjoying a dearth of response about it. And the people with depression and anxiety have been giving him asspats for dealing with such a big thing so heroically, because they know what it's like to deal with a mental illness, but are unsure of how his works.

Just in general, he has no fucking clue about how it works. I don't think even even checked the fucking wikipedia for it. :/

AYRT

You're probably right. It's true that he always needs to have the biggest, baddest type of everything, and as you say, schizophrenia is definitely among the "top worst" mental illnesses in common perception.

Just in general, he has no fucking clue about how it works. I don't think even even checked the fucking wikipedia for it. :/

Who needs Wikipedia when you can just channel a doctor to tell you aaaallll about it :P ?

+1 Thank you. This is exactly why people with schizophrenia who are able to speak up have been lately. We are usually victims of abuse, not abusers ourselves.

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

(Anonymous) - 2015-04-22 15:09 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

(Anonymous) - 2015-04-22 15:55 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

(Anonymous) - 2015-04-22 16:16 (UTC) - Expand

To be honest, it's rather hard to be focused and concentrate enough to be able to be a BNF when you have a psychosis disorder. It's hard enough just existing and trying to keep up with normal living, like a full time job, and I'm considered high functioning.

-the cap with schizophrenia

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

(Anonymous) - 2015-04-20 23:59 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

(Anonymous) - 2015-04-21 00:03 (UTC) - Expand

I like how his 'experience' of Dissociative Identity Disorder is so obviously cribbed from Sybil.

THAT where i had heard a version of this before!

I hadn't thought of Sybil in years.

Thanks Nonnie

Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dyscalc

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys

Re: Continued: ADHD is now ADD, "a form of schizophrenia" is now paranoid schizophrenia, +PTSD, -dys