The fuse is getting short. . .

[cryforme1v]

my suggestion, speak with her psychiatrist before you say anything to her.
I've been suffering clinical depression for a long time because of traumatic experiences. I'm on meds and sleeping pills as well as your wife. I have only been with my boyfriend for a year, and if he came up to me saying he wanted an open relationship because i wasnt fulfilling his every need and want, i'd probably break down.

 

[Panama Hat]

Cry,

Your post makes me the most nervous. Several of the posts really have given me a little insight into how bad it must be for her.

Are you in the U.S.? Because that seems to be the cocktail -- Antidepressants, sleeping pills, other pills to combat the side effects, and never, never, never any emphasis on therapy.

Eli Lily/Phfizer/etc gets no money from therapy. . .

 

[cryforme1v]

Cry,

Your post makes me the most nervous. Several of the posts really have given me a little insight into how bad it must be for her.

Are you in the U.S.? Because that seems to be the cocktail -- Antidepressants, sleeping pills, other pills to combat the side effects, and never, never, never any emphasis on therapy.

Eli Lily/Phfizer/etc gets no money from therapy. . .

im in wisconsin. i guess i made my first post sound like i was just on the meds, my apologies.
I refused to take any kind of meds unless i had someone to talk me through my issues as well. Whats the point in taking a bunch of pills if all its going to do is make me numb and not really help me unless i have help working through my problems.
I've been on the meds now for 2 years and with the help from the boards and my therapist, i've been making headway. Slowly but surely i'm coming to terms with my past and controlling my issues with bipolar.
Be patient with her and suggest to the dr thats prescribing all those pills that she may need to see someone to help her come to terms with why she's depressed, be it her past or just clinical depression.
If the dr doesnt want to refer her to a therapist, then i suggest talking about seeking a therapist with your wife. She can still see a therapist without the referal from her doc, its just a little more difficult to find one that specializes in whatever her issues may be.
Keep in mind - she may or may not want you there with her if she does see a therapist. At first it seems traumatic being in the room with a complete stranger spilling ur guts, but over all- if the therapist is good, it should help her. Just reassure her and make sure she feels like you are going to be there for her.

 

[SweetErika]

Cry,

Your post makes me the most nervous. Several of the posts really have given me a little insight into how bad it must be for her.

Are you in the U.S.? Because that seems to be the cocktail -- Antidepressants, sleeping pills, other pills to combat the side effects, and never, never, never any emphasis on therapy.

Eli Lily/Phfizer/etc gets no money from therapy. . .

Your wife needs a new doc if this one hasn't pushed therapy along with the meds.

Is she seeing a psychiatrist, or just a regular doctor?

This reminds me of my husband's aunt. She was in a car accident like 25 years ago, and her doctor(s) have just been piling on the meds ever since. Just like you said, they keep adding another drug to combat side effects. She can't function on all of those drugs, and likely has a serious addiction problem. She hasn't been a mother to her kids and her husband left her several years ago (he's now happily with another woman, BTW).

 

[Recidiva]

I'm not trying to pick a fight with you fuckmeat, but this deserves its own post after re-reading your last paragraph in your initial post.

Quite a few people with depression or other diagnosed psychiatric illness have a brain chemical imbalance. They may never go off medications. Sometimes counseling and alternative therapies will help. Sometimes they will NOT.

Likening someone on long-term psychiatric medications to someone who is a heroin addict is neither kind, accurate, nor responsible. Encouraging anyone to wean themselves off or encourage a loved one to wean themselves off of psychiatric medications can be fatal. It can result in an increase of suicidal thoughts or a return of psychotic or manic symptoms and could result in the person putting themselves in danger (i.e. walking in traffic, believing they can fly) or dying unintentionally because they couldn't realize the danger they put themselves in. Encouraging someone to seek a second, qualified, face-to-face opinion if you're worried about them is okay. Don't encourage anyone to come off their meds or encourage a loved one to come off their meds, even if you believe otherwise.

People aren't forced to take medications on an outpatient basis unless they're court-mandated to do so (criteria for court-mandated medication is imminent danger to self, imminent danger to others, or imminent death resulting from inability to care for oneself, and this must be caused by a psychiatric condition). The wife in this situation may feel that she was so depressed before she started the medications, this is an improvement. Most people don't get on 10 medications at once for simple, uncomplicated, treatable depression. I think there's something else going on here.

I can't stop saying this. Don't encourage anyone to encourage anyone else to come off their meds over the internet.

This is true. I speak from personal experience. I have severe migraines that are caused by my being allergic to my own hormones. (fun!) My choices are: severe intractable pain or micromanaging every moment of my life, having to do all the hard work with none of the benefits that go with it. I just get to be "less sick" and I'll never be healthy. Sure, I eat well, I exercise, I get excellent sleep and I know exactly what needs to be done in a day to keep my job, my family and my home on track. Do I enjoy it? No. I'm now functioning, but my brain does not and probably never will know what "fun" is. I'm chemically incapable of doing that myself. I'm also incapable of knowing what "sleep" is without medication.

I would never advocate blaming someone else for being sick and saying it's the medication's fault. But diagnosing something, having compassion for something, and understanding something is a separate issue of having your life held hostage to it. I don't have a choice. But I've often felt my husband would have a better deal without me. I love him and he'll always have the option to seek his own bliss if it doesn't lie with me. I think I'd have a better deal without me. I'm going to tough it out and not kill myself because people need me and I see what suicide would do to other people. But whenever someone plays the "three wishes" game - what would you want the most in the world if you had three wishes, I only ever have one. "To never have been born."

I have severe brain chemistry imbalances that cause all the fun stuff that runs in my family. Suicide, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar, OCD...my brother killed himself.

I'm on several medications that I know I cannot function without. I also have a support system that I would not want to function without. I have to work my ass off every single day just to suck at life.

It's true you can't be someone else's doctor. But you also can't hold someone else hostage to an illness, no matter what it is. It sucks to be abandoned. But nobody deserves to be pulled into someone else's horror and forced to stay either.

Don't use someone's illness as an excuse to get away, but don't get sucked into making it worse either and being another model of hopelessness and horror. There are no good choices here. There are hard choices that will result in blame and doubt no matter what you do.

But making no choice when you're at the end of your will, means you're going past what you can willingly do and you're at the whim of everything you're helpless against.

If she can't get better with you and you have no more ideas and no more will to carry through being sick, have compassion for the sick, don't blame her, but don't commit personal suicide out of despair either. You've got to know your limits. Modern medicine doesn't understand and can't cure in my estimation, 90% of true mental illness. What we have in place is superstition and a few crude tools that at best fend off some of the worst, but don't provide a cure.

If you can't rescue her and you resent her, it's better off that she knows she's on her own than to think she's getting support that is really poison.

Yes, maybe she kills herself, maybe it's horrifying, maybe she can't do it. But if you know already that you're on the edge of those same things, you're really not going to be of much help. Get out of the way so she can see what's real.

But don't do it by blaming her inability to make things right with modern medicine. Medicine might be progressing, but the average healthy human being isn't beyond blaming demons and the newest, more sciencey sounding all purpose modern demons - "stress" and "weak willed" for everything. It's very easy as it always has been in history, to blame something simple and go into denial rather than deal with the gray-area complexities that are shrouded in ignorance.

Maybe there isn't a solution. My bet is there isn't without years and years and years of painful trial and error and very hard work as I said, just to manage to vaguely suck at life. It's what I did. I might have managed alone. I'd never have managed with a partner that wasn't all in.

 

[Quoll]

Cry,

Your post makes me the most nervous. Several of the posts really have given me a little insight into how bad it must be for her.

Are you in the U.S.? Because that seems to be the cocktail -- Antidepressants, sleeping pills, other pills to combat the side effects, and never, never, never any emphasis on therapy.

Eli Lily/Phfizer/etc gets no money from therapy. . .

I find it surprising that only now are you getting a little insight into what it is like for her.

Mental illness of any kind is a torturous way to exist (it's not living, by any stretch of the imagination) and not something people willingly bring on themselves.

For more insight: http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=303914

 

[southernsky]

Just because there isn't a cure for mental illness doesn't automatically mean the medications are awful and psychiatry is awful, it may also mean that mental illnesses can be severe, debilitating, and multi-faceted, thereby making treatment much more complex than say, bronchitis. Many medical conditions require very careful managing and the patient doesn't necessarily return to full function (late-onset asthma, etc). Granted, I think we have a long way to go in treating mental illness, but I do see patients every day who have made a huge improvement on psychiatric medications and are able to return to functioning because of them. I know that the best case scenario and what everyone wishes for is to not have the mental illness in the first place, or to return to functioning like "normal" and not have side effects, but if the options are a vegetative state, suicidal thoughts/attempts, or even feeling hopeless and worthless for a majority of the time versus feeling "drugged" or "out of it", I guess it's ultimately your choice, but I feel ethically obligated to try to help people out of that through various means, it's part of why I do what I do.

Many injuries and illnesses do not allow people to return to previous functioning. I know a lot of orthopedic injuries and sports injuries leave people with a limp, muscle spasms, chronic pain, or restrictions on lifting or range of motion, yet I don't hear the same vitriole directed towards ortho, and I wonder why.

 

[Panama Hat]

Not Luddite

One thing that I probably have to clarify here is that the absolute failure to actually confront the underlying issues is not necessarily the psych's fault. There is, as in all things, more to this than meets the eye.

I have come to the conclusion that she, being in the medical field, has developed a sense of who the quacks are, and who the effective therapists are; and stays away from the effective ones. Which is not to say that she is not suffering, nor that there aren't real issues with which she has to deal.

I mentioned to another Lit member that it seems as if she had gone to the ER with a serious, life-threatening, deep cut. They immediately applied a (proprietary and patented and obscenely profitable, of course) bandage of some sort and said, "Come back in a week and we'll fix it." Then when she came back, they just replaced the bandage, for which they receive a kickback, and told her to come back in a month, and they'll fix it. And so on for 20 years.

It's just so frustrating. I'm angry. I'm horny. I'm lonely. I feel I've been robbed of the prime of my life by pharmaceutical 'incentives' to doctors. . . but most importantly, I feel like somebody stole my wife.

(wow. rant. . .)

 

[southernsky]

Who is getting these kickbacks and where are they coming from? I'm genuinely curious. If someone has a would too deep and painful to explore, maybe that's alright. I'm not of the belief that every single thing has to be ripped open, brought to light and examined. I do see individual counseling benefiting you quite a lot, it could help with the anger and someone who sees you in person will have a much better perspective on the situation than we will. It sounds as though you don't believe your wife has an illness and don't believe that medications are capable of treating it, and somehow believe that she's definitely faking this for secondary gain. I'm not sure where all of that is coming from, but some of that anger coming off of you may be better directed elsewhere.

 

[SweetErika]

Many injuries and illnesses do not allow people to return to previous functioning. I know a lot of orthopedic injuries and sports injuries leave people with a limp, muscle spasms, chronic pain, or restrictions on lifting or range of motion, yet I don't hear the same vitriole directed towards ortho, and I wonder why.

Maybe not obvious ortho conditions/injuries, but chronic pain definitely has similar stigmas and issues as mental illness. It seems like any injury or illness that can't be seen clearly is often assumed to be fake, those who suffer with it are deemed drug-seekers, addicts, lazy, crazy, worthless, etc. Even many medical professionals and loved ones of those with the conditions often buy into these ridiculous ideas.

 

[Panama Hat]

Sky,

I am myself a professional, and I know that there is never a categorical right or wrong in matters such as this. Your faith is somewhat misplaced.

The kickbacks are clear and well known. The best place for information is www.thelastpsychiatrist.com He does some absolutely devastating analyses of pharmaceutical applications to the FDA.

Anger? well, yes. I am angry. But I agree with you that the therapeutic culture isn't a panacea, and that we must all live with our demons. There is, however, a qualitative difference between someone who is incapable of coping with their demons, and someone who nurtures their demons, and then blames me for the wreckage.

Talking to a therapist never really helps because they always come down to "suck it up" or "divorce her".

We lie in the graves we dig ourselves.

 

[Recidiva]

Sky,

I am myself a professional, and I know that there is never a categorical right or wrong in matters such as this. Your faith is somewhat misplaced.

The kickbacks are clear and well known. The best place for information is www.thelastpsychiatrist.com He does some absolutely devastating analyses of pharmaceutical applications to the FDA.

Anger? well, yes. I am angry. But I agree with you that the therapeutic culture isn't a panacea, and that we must all live with our demons. There is, however, a qualitative difference between someone who is incapable of coping with their demons, and someone who nurtures their demons, and then blames me for the wreckage.

Talking to a therapist never really helps because they always come down to "suck it up" or "divorce her".

We lie in the graves we dig ourselves.

I'm aware I'm incapable of living with my demons. In prior centuries I would have died chained to an insane asylum wall or burned at the stake as a witch or having holes poked in my head to "let the demons escape."

Turns out it's the synapses in my brain that can't clear chemical signals combined with the inability to produce any of the brain chemistry that approximates pleasure or sleep.

Therapy on me does absolutely no good, because there's no way to resolve the inherent crappiness of my situation and I've already got all the things that I can mitigate by thought and therapy, mitigated. It's an act of will to continue to breathe each day and that's what I've got. My will. Nobody can do this for me.

Now keep in mind I was told for a lifetime that it's because God is testing me, or because I live badly or because I have a bad attitude, it's always been my fault because the current remedies of the time couldn't work and everyone thought they should.

Imitrex was a revelation. I'm not a person of faith, but if I were to worship anything in this lifetime, it'd be Imitrex. Suddenly it becomes clear, no, it's not my attitude or my inability to visualize successs, it's a chemical.

I'm not blaming anyone for my situation, and there's no "unresolved" issues that therapy will address. I have a fucked up brain and that's just a shame.

I can't say what your wife is going through, but I can say that the least you can do is not be part of the problem.

It ALWAYS involves get over it AND suck it up. It all depends on how much you're sucking, but therapy doesn't really fix individuals, it makes it easier for individuals to interact in a group so that they don't scare the rest of the individuals. It's grease that can make social hinges close without squeaking. It isn't however, a fix for a shattered door or melted hinges.

If she's got a problem that can be solved by talk, then she needs to choose to talk. If she needs chemical aid, she needs to choose chemical aid.

Yes. Life sucks. Do the best you can and if anybody else thinks they know better, they probably will never get a chance to know what you or she were going through and there's no ref that's going to call that play ultimately. You have to make the best call you can and be the best person you can. You can continue to support her without being a spouse. Just don't be a dick about it.