shyness and shame
By shag carpet bomb • Sep 2nd, 2009 • Category: Research, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sicknesswow. i picked up the book, _Our Daily Meds_, because it was one of three books reviews in the New York Times and recommended by someone at LBO. There was another book I am about 1/3 of the way through. It’s about how shyness became social anxiety disorder. I just finished the chapter on all the politics, strong arming, complete fabrication, lack of evidence, etc. etc that characterized the writing of the DSM III. Pretty scary stuff how little some of these people bothered to give any thought to something that had the potential to kill people.
scary.
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Again… I’m skeptical. I have anxiety disorder. Believe me, it is not the same thing as shyness. Although plenty of people think it is and get very snobbish about it and treat it like a big joke.
The DSM, the history of the writing and revision of it, is incredible. I scratched the surface working on my gender and medicine focus for my history component of my MA. I was trying to write about how we preface (gender) bodies using the actual prefaces to as many health and hygiene guides for girls, daughters, and wives I could get my hands on. That was a fun research project. You know, there simply aren’t health and hygiene guides for boys and men. So you can imagine what I found.
ANYWAY, your recent reading has me thinking about the troubles i have with my meds regimine. i’m pretty sure i’ve spoken to you about my issues. but i suffer from chronic mania and without some sort of therapy, or med regimine, i’ve been unable to control it. but i don’t trust the prescriptive process at all. i take gabapentin now. korea only sells Neurontin. i’d like to switch to something else but can’t for two reasons: quitting gabapentin means withstanding an incredibly uncomfortable withdrawal. personally, whenever I have tried to stop, I end up with clammy and feeling itchy and covered in bugs. so, i go right back to taking it. i must say that i can report that it helped decrease the attacks of i suffer. but it in no way helps me maintain myself when i suffer an attack.
i took valproic acids for many years (brand name is depakote) and that worked better. but i blow up to 210# on that shit, even while working out. so, fuck that. honestly. i can’t hack taking a chemical that makes me fat. it also makes me want to sit on a couch and do nothing. so double fuck that.
so, k, i don’t know what to do. my illness is no myth. i’ve got the fire that won’t go out and nobody wants to be touched by it. mania is seriously creepy. it affects everybody around me. i have to be honest about it. i decided, long ago, to forego my protest of pharma and take the pills. anything to allow me to sleep and have a meaningful relationship with my partner.
so what does somebody like me do? in this situation, i feel pretty much screwed. i get my drugs from the Veteran’s Admin. And they have deals with pharma companies. They don’t want to experiment to find the right chemicals. Right now, they are pushing gabapentin. They sell us vets a generic. Six years ago, they were pushing valproic acid.
I’m open to suggestions. But I can tell you. Diet and Exercise and Meditation do not work. When I fall into a manic fit, I fall. I have gotten good at reading the approach to the manic attack and sometimes i have even curbed it. but most times it’s one minute gary is fine, the next he’s seeing vivid colors and either really happy or really paranoid and upset and swearing etc
hope you’re well. g
“I have anxiety disorder. Believe me, it is not the same thing as shyness.”
Yeah. That’s the point of this guy’s book.
Hey Gary –
I knew you’d understand, so thanks for this. I totally know where you are coming from. This book was about drugs my grandmother, mother, aunt, niece, sisters are prescribed. My niece has ADHD. IT was about a drug I was prescribed which almost killed me. It’s about drugs I would probably be described if my congenital heart disease worsens.
I think I said up there that, personally, I would fucking flip a coin if faced with the decision. Of couse, I flip a coin to make a lot of decisions. I’ll do a pros and cons list and I just can’t decide. That’s the way the information in this book can strike you. What the hell do I do now?
I think I’m more attuned to it because I have been through this every fewyears or so. My family, with the heart disease history, we all die young because of it. So, we have a big incentive to pay attention to the research. So, I do. But then there are the fads — in terms of diet, exercise, and medicine. And one after the other, they all turn out to be bogosities that are sometimes quite dangerous. My aunt, for instance, died from super low fat diets. They actually make this condition worse. But for years, that was THE approach touted by the medical industry. My grandmother got sicker and sicker until they realized that it was the diet that was harming her. Then they gave her stantin drugs that made her very sick.
So, I completely understand.
I think what bothers me is that, from my perspective, I can’t tell *my* story about prozac or depression because people who feel better because of prozac think that I’m the enemy. all I’m doing is saying, “Hey, the research even shows that 30% of us will be fine with a placebo. We’ll get better. Another 30% will be helped by the drug. Another 30% will be helped with therapy.” Etc.
why isn’t that fucking good enough? Why can’t people just recognize that stories about people improving with therapy are not the enemy of stories of people improving with zoloft are not the enemy of stories of people who died on zoloft are not the enemy of stories of people who died because they did nothing.
I understand there’s this culture of denial and shame around mental illness.
but it’s not monolithic. The interesting thing about our society is that this culture of denial, blame and shame also exists right alongside a culture of pill popping to treat every malady that comes down the pike.
they both exist and recognizing that might make it a little more difficult to sift through the issues, but I gotta say, it will probably be a lot more rewarding to do that than to try to reduce the world to an either/or.`
As for the practical advice, Petersen’s last chapter addresses that. Me, personally, I have always prided myself on knowing what the hell was going on with me. I was as the ex husband’s family approached illness with complete ignorance. whatever the doctor said, they did. it was horrifying. My mother in law was on 17 different kinds of medications and suffered from drug-induced dimentia. we had to pull her off all her meds through a painful process, to figure out which ones were causing what side effects, etc.
That fucking doctor she had presribed prescription strength dramamine when she complained — at 70! — of being dizzy. She was not driving or taking cruises. Her dizziness was most likely causes by a physical probelm or, possibly, a side effect of the various drugs she was on. The answer was to find out, not prescribe *another* drug for people who get seasickness.
and that is what happened to this family over and over again. they’d take these drugs, believing totally in their doc, then they would get sicker and it would turn out that it was a side effect.
so, i learned from that to never accept anything from a doc at face value. do the reserarch.
and then i read this book to find out that i can’t even trust the research! it is horrifying, really!
and the DSM thing, Gary. Really. as a small side trip, he covers a bit about the way the DSM categorizes premenstrual disorder — and the ridiculous politics behind it. i guess we are just learning all this because they published proceedings of their notes, letters between them, tape recordings, etc. recently.
one guy submitted a proposal for an unhappiness disorder that was really embarassing. he used ethnic slurs against jews and eastern europeans. he described these folks as “whiney” and “irritating” and claimed that they all talked in a voice that others found irritating.
you read that shit and think, wow and holy cow!
i will probably put on my list the books about the politics of the DSM, to be read sometime later. :)
oh and gary, i can’t remember where you stand on psychoanalysis, but you probably already knew that the DSMIII was lead by a guy who surrounded himself with a committee who was hostile to psychoanalysis which, to me, has devastating consequences for people. They managed to stonewall the psyhoanalysts who had years of diagnostic research to be drawn on. they just ignored it.
psychoanalysis. i like the process, actually. of course, i’m aware of the problems, many problems with the development of psychoanalytic theory and the relationship between analyst and analysand. but i love kristeva. lacan is fun. the complexities and complications and contradicitons and ambiguities in his ecrits make it worth reading even if you wish to treat it as fiction. the theory, the work is useful. and not just for lazy litcritters.
the dsm is a travesty.
the whole notion of prescriptive medicine should be rethought. a system that includes an inclusive discourse. i believe in placebos. quite frankly just the notion that i’ve taken my medicine has a calming and order-ing if you will affect on me; and when i know i forgot to take my pills, i typically have a bad day.
doctors in korea just give out pills. i swear. i just had a bacterial infection and saw an ENT and a family medicine doc. They both prescribed me meds without asking about what i’m currently taking. this is common. and sadly can be deadly.
and please be patient with the weird phrases and errors in my comments. i’m teaching English at a public high school in Korea: 800 students a week in 20 classes. My English, during the day, suffers from the hours of slow talking and repeating myself. When I sit down to write comments and blog posts between classes or after school, I find that it’s hard to get my thoughts out in a coherent manner.
i should write about this. quite frankly, if my English suffers as a result of immersion in Korean daily life–quite ordinary life as I’m a government employee and treated like I’m a working-class Korean–then the quality of my instruction may suffer. At any rate, I notice it even if my colleagues, all Korean, do not.
oh and the meds don’t help with this either. heh.