Next week, we’ll meet with our psychiatrist to discuss how to proceed in our mental health care. Whether we want to continue at all, and if so, how. We’re very nervous and still haven’t made a definite decision yet.
Our nurse practitioner is still off sick. Until a few days ago, I thought that we didn’t need any mental health care, so we were more or less okay with him having been off for over a month already. I felt that getting assessed for trauma-related conditions, as our psychiatrist had originally wanted, was just stressing us for no reason. Most likely, we wouldn’t be believed so just end up where we’re now, with a BPD diagnosis and required to do DBT. I guess we’d rather keep the status quo than be told we definitely don’t have trauma-related issues.
Then we thought, so what if we keep on merely surviving like we do now? If we don’t get therapy, will our mental health ever get any better? Besides, our psychiatrist had been talking discharge, even though she called it a break. So what if we end up in crisis?
Some of us were also feeling like our psychiatrist wants to get rid of us. Like we’re a pain in her neck. Lots of pain has been coming up and today, we nearly landed in crisis because of it. We called the mental health team, even though we’ve been feeling like we shouldn’t need them. Our former assigned nurse called us back. Thankfully, we had a good talk with her.
She said that not doing DBT or trauma therapy doesn’t mean we’d be discharged altogether. We could also just have an occasional supportive check-in with a nurse. That’s not what our psychiatrist said, but oh well. It also doesn’t mean we’ll never get therapy again, or something. Maybe we could take a break for half a year and see whether we want the assessment an dpossibly therapy then.
A lot of us are feeling all sorts of things. We feel attachment pain, which scares the crap out of some of us and makes some of us feel shameful. After all, our overreliance on mental health was the exact reason we got kicked out of the mental institution last year.
It doesn’t help that our support coordinator has also been off sick for over a week. I hope it’s just the flu. She’s supposed to go to the appt with us next week, but if she’s still sick, of course she won’t come. We did discuss our concerns with our staff at day activities yesterday and they offered to write our questions down for us.
As a side note, we had a very validating experience at day activities. When discussing our issues with mental health care, we mentioned DID (calling it multiple personality). Our staff said she’d seen us switch to a little girl. Wow. I didn’t know anyone could tell unless we use our own names.
A Multitude of Musings 