Posted by CareBear04 on January 12, 2005, at 4:02:32
hi-- i haven't really been through the archives on this board, but i was wondering if anyone has experience with pdocs who manage their meds and also do therapy.
i've had two such drs, both psychiatrists who did analytic training to become psychoanalysts. they have the couch and everything, but i've never used it. at most, i've gone in 3x a week; i'm currently going once or twice.
i'm just not a therapy person. i sort of just want my pdoc to manage my meds and not push me into looking for a psychological/circumstance-related cause for everything, espeically problems that i think are primarily medical and can be explained by drugs/meds and such. one of the pdocs practiced in NYC where analysis is much more the rage, and i think he outsourced the prescribing to a psychopharmacologist. he did do meds for me, but after six weeks of seeing him, he showed me the list of meds he had written for me, and it was longer than the list of meds for all his patients in the past three years. my pdoc now manages meds on her own, and though i think she's wonderful, i sometimes think she should stick to therapy and delegate the med management to someone with more experience with drugs. i definitely think it helps to have a pdoc prescribe meds after talking to you at length and not just a 20-min checkup every month. still, i've ventured out of the realm of the familiar SSRIs and other frequently-prescribed drugs into more remote ones, and am currently on a nasty cocktail of 11 or 12 meds. i think that's enough to make anyone loopy and not herself, but the pdoc/T keeps pushing to find a psychological trigger or cause.
i've heard it said that meds pollute the transference. i'm not sure really of what that means except that a pdoc who does therapy is more likely less forceful about med choices because of the need to preserve the therapeutic relationship than one who deals only with meds.
have others been seeing or have seen pdocs as Ts? how do they balance the dual roles of prescribing and talking? the ones i've seen put their faith in talking so much that it baffles me why they would go to medical school, do a psych residency, hone those prescribing skills, and then invest 5+ more years and lots of money into analytic training. that alone i find puzzling but more so the pdoc analysts who then don't prescribe. why go through so much trouble getting a medical degree and learning to use meds as tools... only never to use them again? seems like a PhD would make more sense if that's the type of practice they desire.
anyone have any thoughts? doesn't have to directly relate-- anything even touching on the questions would be appreciated. thanks!
poster:CareBear04
thread:441031
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050111/msgs/441031.html