My current psych (nurse practitioner) is not very kind or receptive or appreciative of my insight fulness and introspective info or my feelings...........she basically has disregarded my personal opinions. We had a lengthy heated debate about how I needed to be received as credible to her.....asking her to believe in my perceptiveness and ability to look at myself and my thoughts and behaviors objectively.....she told me that she was not interested in me being credible and that she would rely on my neighbors input and my therapist's input to see how I was actually doing.....and not my own reports. Of course, this is extremely invalidating to me. I want to get a different mental health provider, but my therapist suggests that I try and stick it out with this "cold and unapproachable" one and give her a chance. Often, you are labeled as an "agitator" or a "difficult patient" when you attempt to be proactive and highly verbal regarding your psych needs. I mean, it's difficult to deal with the "God complex" that many doctors have and they dislike highly being questioned on their decisions about your care. I will bide my time with this current emotionally repressed provider, but I am keeping my eyes and ears open for the first chance I can change providers with a legitimate reason other than saying its' a "personality clash". It's sad but true, when you are mentally ill, you are often thought of as uneducated, flawed, without healthy coping skills and somewhat not as valid as a person without mental illness. I always tell my doctors that I may have mental illness but that in no way means that I have lost my intelligence, my intuitiveness and my ability to be lucid. Of course, most doctors do not like you challenging them or bringing your own theories to the table. So, she doesn't seem to care or have thoughts about me telling her that my ECT's gave me rage.........so, now that your question to me has got me thinking......I think I will hold off on thinking any more about having more ECT's until I find the right mental health provider that is a better fit for me......meaning....finding one that is kind, compassionate and appreciate about my abillity to articulate my symptoms and my behaviors and my thoughts and to validate that I am aware of my despondency and I actually have come to learn what motivates or propels me into a depression and I've also recently discovered through being very introspective about why I won't shower for the past 4 months.....I believe that I'm punishing myself for a past bad mistake and I don't think fI deserve to be clean and presentable. Of course, this enlightenment only came to me after me struggling for about 10 years with the issue of me not showering.....I could never figure it out and why I was so afraid and opposed to showering........I just finally came to this conclusion....again, after a decade of not knowing why. I used to daily fix my hair, my makeup, my wardrobe and have matching purses and shoes and beautiful jewelry. I just suddenly quit dressing and stayed in the same night gown for months and months (the upside to that is there is little to no laundry to do...). I will say, I have also come to realize through my soul searching that being well dressed and curled hair and good makeup and jewelry and accessories may make me more accepted by our shallow society's standards and perhaps make me more attractive to men.....but I now know that none of those things make me more valuable as a human being at all. They might make me feel better about myself, though, so I do see the need of showering to be legitmately valuable to me in that respect but I have had to abandon that those things will heal my mental illness or make me a more worthwhile human being. It is what I'm like inside as a human and my actions and words towards others that will define me and my worth. It is a delicate line to walk.......the motivation needed to shower.......for me, my truth and my honesty to myself and others is highly important and for me to be authentic is one of my highest priorities.....so I don't dress up and look good on the outside to make my insides feel better...I am a "what you see is what you get" person. So, it's important for me to look on the outside to reflect how I'm doing on the inside. It's my personal "thermometer" or "gage" to myself on how well I'm doing or not doing.