I'm sorry you have had such a bad experience with the public mh clinics in your area....they must be similar to what they were like in Calif......however here in KY.....I have never received such thorough care, treatment & compassion & close knit DBT group that has grown over the several years I've been going to it.......I commented to my psychologist the other day.....as to how much better I really feel after seeing her & talking seriously in a logical way through the issues I am dealing with & sometimes even going back & touching on the issues I dealt with in the past when the situational depression first hit......because of the depresonalization & the PTSD from the trauma with the home care person when my mother was dying of cancer, they assigned me to one of the psychologists at the clinic......so I got the top notch quality.

What I got from the private mh community in Calif was REALLY NOT GOOD.....some was really bad, but most was just NOT GOOD.....didn't do any further damage.....but they also didn't have any idea how to treat me.....I ended up on medical leave of absence from the engineering company I worked for.....so I was forced to go to a pdoc & go to the pdoc & T that their insurance would cover. The first pdoc was also a pdoc at the air force base & he did have a lot of good experience.....but I felt like a guinea pig & that didn't go over good with me because of all the side effects I ended up going through including anorexia initiated by the prozac & Wellbutrin.....but I always lost weight when stressed all my life so he stuck me in an ED treatment center.

Everyone I saw thought like I did that it was the loss of my career & the inability to get any other engineering position back in 1994 when aerospace crashed in California....& at the same time we had the huge earthquake there & it was like living in a war zone with everything collapsed around me & the freeway drive was 6 hours to work & 6 home & I wasn't in a place where I could work from home & I hated the department I was working in anyway which was the initiating problem......but underlying it all was my bad marriage & feeling trapped....I felt trapped in the horrible department with a director that wouldn't let me take another technical engineering position when one came up & then trapped in my bad marriage especially not working I had no money if I did get divorced to take care of myself......so the suicide attempts just kept coming coming until my pdoc refused to treat me any longer & everyone thought I was just being stupid in my reaction to loosing my career......(didn't put the marriage issue into the picture until I finally left 6 years ago & found out just how bad it had been when I was finally free).....most friends didn't want to deal with someone who was suicidal....my horse trainer & riding instructor thought she had all the answers as to how I should get better......then I had to get a new pdoc....ended up getting assigned one after a suicide attempt & ended up in a private psych hospital I had heard was good.....he was good & better with natural meds after he tried more with even worse bad effects. People at church had no concept of what was going on even though they knew what was happening....my H was always visiting at the hospital & my mother would always visit.....but with H it was because it was the right thing to do & one has to be there even though there was NO emotional support (because there never had been anything between us from the beginning of the marriage other than fighting).....so it was a meaningless gesture on his part...but it made him look good to everyone else......& I really messed up my daughters life with all that during her senior year of high school.....even though I was finally home to drive her around where she needed to go.

In reality....I couldn't understand myself of accept what I was really going through.....why would I expect anyone else....I was always the logical one in my life who figured out the why of everything....& I had no idea why I was reacting in this way to the situation I was in while not realizing the marriage situation as part of it at all (until the very end.....almost).....so I was as evil to myself as everyone else.