Posted by Tabitha on January 26, 2005, at 10:53:49
In reply to Therapist's response to a medical diagnosis?, posted by pretty_paints on January 26, 2005, at 7:26:27
If you have a chemical issue in your brain, you need a therapist who's sensitive to that. Since they see you far more often than your pdoc, part of their job is to help monitor you for recurrence of your symptoms that might need a med adjustment. I would not want to work with a therapist who didn't recognize that you need to fix the chemistry first, then look for life triggers, and fix the cognitive and emotional issues. When my chemistry is out of whack, talk therapy is pretty useless.
I'm rather alarmed that your therapist doesn't seem able to help you recognize psychotic thoughts. To me you'd need to kind of shut the door on those thoughts-- treat them like OCD talking, or the voice of depression. You don't want to indulge them and analyze them and accept them as valid thoughts. For example if I go into therapy and say "everything's black and hopless, life isn't worth living, everybody is a robot going through the motions", I don't want my therapist's first response to be Hmm, why do you feel this way? I want her to tell me it sounds like my meds are out of whack and I need to call my pdoc. It's OK if she also helps me look for an event that may have triggered the episode-- but I want her to recognize that I've gotten into a bad chemical state and need help with that.
I think it's kind of useless to try and figure out the cause of these conditions. Nobody can say for sure. Whatever it is, once you've got it, you need to fix the chemistry.
However, years of talk therapy have helped my chemistry too. I'm on less meds now and don't get as bad. I don't know if that will be true for psychosis. For depression, I definitely had cognitive and emotional issues contributing to it that were helped by therapy. But the therapy didn't start helping *until* I got the chemistry reasonably normal with meds.
poster:Tabitha
thread:447985
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050122/msgs/448085.html