A Question of Trust

So, I have a PA doing the work of a psychiatrist through American TelePsychiatry. He's a former prison guard and Naval medical officer. His name is P. I am a former inmate in the same state that he once worked (he was at a different camp than I was). I came to him yesterday after breaking up with my gf and told him I wanted to be put in a permanent twilight state to just sleep away the rest of my days. The conversation went, to the best of my recollection, like this:

Me: Remember what I said about psychotropics being off the table? Scratch that. I want whatever combination I need to be put into a stuporific state. I want to have only the bare minimal cognition necessary to function but without any conscious thought.

P: Okay...

Me: I want to do the thorazine shuffle. No risperidone. Can I get thorazine?

P: What about Halidol?

Me: Is it strong? Is there anything stronger? You know I'm going to look it up, right? *gets phone*

P: It's pretty strong. It comes in a variety of dosages.

Me: What about seroquel? I took that once.

P: What was the dosage?

Me: I don't know. I got it from some guy in jail, and slept eighteen hours. What's it go up to?

P: I have patients on eight hundred and a thousand milligrams a day. I don't know how they do it.

Me: Let's start at three hundred. That ought to make it so I can't feel. Just like in prison when they would medicate the problem inmates so they would end up doing the Thorazine shuffle.

P: Is that what they did...? *gets irritated look on his face*

Me: Damn right. Any chance of giving me something that will induce permanent brain damage if I OD? Like permanent catatonia?

P: Are you planning on OD'ing with something I prescribe?

Me: *laughs* Not that I'd tell you. Besides, you'd be doing society a favor. I'm one of the undesirables, anyway, right? No one will care what I do with it.

P: I can start you on twenty five miligrams of seroquel twice daily.

Me: No three hundred?

P: We can go up to that. We'll follow up in two weeks.

That's ultimately what we ended up deciding on so I can just live to wake up, take a pill and go back to sleep. What bothers me is one, he showed little desire to follow up on whether I was going to self-harm in some fashion or not. Two, he still has not gone through my eval test that he gave me to determine my mental status, so he doesn't even know what he's treating me for. Three, he was quick to go along with what I wanted (Halidol and Seroquel are anti-psychotics, not anti-depressants), especially after I made the crack about his previous profession (problem inmates being the ones they medicated); and four, that sh*tty look, which he had on his face the entire time as though he agreed with me about being a cast-off and was weighing the risk.

As a result of his not going over the eval, I have yet to see the actual psychiatrist. I asked for a referral to a psychologist, but because I am on medicaid, there's no psychologists around here who take my insurance.

I am already extremely paranoid about psychologists and psychiatrists in general after being their guinea pig for 13 years in a state pen from my teenage years until I was 33 (a couple years longer if you include jail and court). I had one threaten to essentially play with my file and massage it so that they would try to keep me locked up for life. There's no coming back from hearing that and trusting psychs. I have no choice, now, because the one I did trust in there and whom I spoke to sporadically since release, but as she's not in private practice, I cannot see her. I trust psychiastrists even less because I've been on every anti-depressant most people can name: Pamelor, meliril, indoril, lithium, remeron, paxil, prozac, lexapro, wellbutrin, celexa, venlafaxine, zoloft, amitryptiline, kolonipin, buspar, xanax, and probably a few others I'm missing.

And now, I'm suddenly feeling that very familiar paranoia about this guy, too. Am I crazy in thinking he may have crossed a line or two, ethically? I mean, yeah, I asked for it, but now that I'm thinking a little more clearly, yeah, sleep-walking through life is probably going to be a bore, but doesn't he have a duty to ensure I'm not making bad decisions clouded by emotion?

"Am I crazy in thinking he may have crossed a line or two, ethically?"

Not crazy at all. I'm a bit shocked reading that, but I have no experience with psychiatrists, only psychologists. Especially when you mentioned possibly ODing, that should have been a huge red flag but he seemed to have shrugged it off...

That's exactly the feeling I got with it. And not being able to trust pdocs in the first place only exacerbates the problem. Glad to know I'm not the only one who seemed a bit put off by that. Unfortunately, it feels like I have no choice but to keep seeing him because I have medicaid and it's pretty much you get what you get.

At least there's this site.

Well, there is the option of free counseling, not sure if that's something that would help you at all, but here: https://www.google.com/search?q=pro-bono+counseling+in+wisconsin&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1

My mom works with a pro-bono agency here in Michigan so that's how I know it's a thing that exists and a lot of people don't seem to know about it.

Part of me feels really badly that I said that to him because he wrote me an ESA letter with no questions asked. *sigh* I think in a way he's just trying to give me what I wanted rather than what I needed.

Or am I overthinking this? This is part of the problem. I could be mistaking portions of it because my memory sucks, and it's just my paranoia, or this guy is just inept and doesn't care.

Your conversation with P sounded to me like he thought you were just playing word games with him & bantering statements around.

My pdoc put me on 600mg of seroquel when I weighed 93 lbs after I went through a trauma & couldn't sleep because of the nightmares.....I was totally non-functional on that amount for almost 2 years.

You notice after all that bantering between you...mhe ONLY put yiuon the 25 mg of seroquel a very conservative approach.. all the other stuff on both sides of the conversation sounded like BS'ing around from both.

Those are just the portions I remember the clearest, and most of it is there. I remember specifically asking him about quality of life and asking him, too, if he really thought me taking meds was going to improve my situation. He couldn't answer.

At that moment, though, I really wanted to be (and still do) "non-functional" because then I don't have to think. Right now, two parts of me are at war: the parts that want to just sleep forever, and the other part that gets pissed off at the situation and the inability to change it. If I have to be stuck behind this invisible wall that no one sees but me and is always there for the rest of my life, why wouldn't I want to be rendered comatose through the creative use of psychotropics? All indications are that I will be alone years before I die through natural causes; why suffer when I can sleep?

sadly, for me, i understand all too well what you are talking about, Michael.
i was poisoned by psych meds, and lost 65 IQ points... i was a walking idiot.
being a zombie just makes you a target for 'you don't want to know what'.
better to take up meditation on holosync, and just sit your life away listening to it rain... or perhaps take up daydreaming, put yourself in the zombie state.
i hope 25 mg takes off the edge so you can have options~~
i've been alone for 25 yrs: life is hard, and then you DON'T die~

I'm very tempted, the more I think about it, to take the meds and keep telling the doctor every time I see him to up it. Loss of IQ? That sucks, Gus. (((Gus))). For me, I don't care about that, though. I'm pretty much a second-class citizen/ward of the state, so I can't do another 25 years alone.

I know once I start, I won't stop because I'm too obstinate. That's what scares me, and why I haven't gone to get the prescription yet. It's soooo tempting, though...

I hope you don't go the route you're considering, but I don't know what sort of options are out there for someone in your situation either. I watch a show called Pit Bulls and Parolees so I know there are good places that will work with prison folk, but I'm unsure how to find them. It's such a shame, get someone out of the system who wants to work, but they can't because of their past.

I was looking at doggos to adopt and found one I like, but for all the talk about adoption and how there's so many dogs, it's like a dog lottery. Well, you can't win if you don't play...*sigh*

I think I'm going to just wait and see about this guy first; part of the problem is I think I've held on to my anger so long because I always get pissed off with myself, and that anger at myself (which is really just self-loathing) fuels my paranoia, I think.

A legitimate rescue should try to help you find a dog that is good for you. Just tell them what you look for in a dog and they'll try to match you up with one that fits your needs. It still doesn't always work out, but it's more likely to. If you can up your odds to win the lotto, why not do so? ^^