Link: Reclaiming your power during medication appointments

[Stellaria]

Cool article:
Reclaiming your power during medication appointments with your psychiatrist
By Patricia Deegan, Ph.D.

Meeting with a psychiatrist during "medication appointments" is usually a very disempowering experience. The meetings usually last for 15 or 20 minutes. During the meeting we are expected to answer a few perfunctory questions and to leave with prescriptions for powerful drugs that can dramatically alter the quality of our lives. In these meetings the psychiatrist assumes a position of power and we usually fulfill the expected role of being a quiet, unquestioning, passive patient. Subsequently we will be praised for merely being compliant or scolded/punished if we fail to comply with prescribed medications. Over the years I have developed a number of strategies for changing the power imbalance during medication meetings with psychiatrists. I would like to share some of these strategies with you.

- please go to link to read about strategies, too long to quote here.

[Laura]

That's a great link, thanks Nina

[limestone]

Nina, thank you very much for sharing that link It's fanastic. I've bookmarked it and plan to come back later when I've got proper time and to look at it in more detail.

I read the link of the article you gave and that was brilliant. I also read a different one- here's a short quote from it:

Mental illness is a coping mechanism, not a disease. And those who know this know that drugs will only fend off the pain for so long and then it comes back again. And it seems to me, the difference between those who recover and those who go on to become chronic, lifelong mental patients are those who are aware of this, those of us who know that a second, third or fourth drug added to our repertoire will not ease the pain. In fact it only increases the pain-when we feel hopeless and helpless. Create a safe space. Find a new way to cope. And I believe you too can recover from your so-called mental illness.

http://www.power2u.org/trauma/ment_cope.html

There were a couple of things in article link you posted that I want to find out more info on as I didn't know that you can use coping mechanisms for those type of things too (that's if their claim is true).

thanks again