Inside the mind of a psychiatrist – Page 118 – Inside The Mind of a Psychiatrist

When a significant number of men take no responsibility for raising their sons and daughters, the kids take it upon themselves to create the father they don’t have. They visit daddy in prison and see what a tough-ass the guy is — jailhouse tats, bad attitude slouch, and the if-u-mess-with-me-I’ll-break-every-bone-in-your-body deadeye stare.

Everyone needs a daddy. If you can’t have one home at night helping mom and helping with your homework, you become just like the one who lives behind bars or works the street.

Add to the mix, the need for a teenager to differentiate himself from his parents [music, dress, attitude, defiance], what better way to piss off an entire generation of free-thinker-baby-boomers than to act like a low life hoodlum. So now rock stars, young men and woman of all socioeconomic classes, and adults with a teenage wannabe mentality, are walking around with jailhouse tattoos. They are adamant that it’s not a jailhouse, screw-you mentality. It’s a fashion statement. You’re so uncool if you can’t see it.

The mind of this psychiatrist watches in awe at how crazy we all are. Oh yeah, I need to go out and buy pants 4 sizes too big and wear them around my knees.

A number of years ago, I was post surgery for a sports related injury. Woozy, they rolled me back to my hospital room and hooked me up to an IV drip, an EKG monitor, and a machine to give me morphine if the pain got too bad. As soon as the nurse left the room I needed to get up.

“What are you doing?” my wife said, startled that I was trying to stand.

“I have to get up,” I said.

“Stop it you’re being crazy. You’re going to pull the IV out.”

I ignored her, pulled off the EKG wires, pulled out the morphine drip, and started rolling the IV bottle towards the bathroom. I knew I was being crazy, but couldn’t stop it.

“Going to the bathroom,” I said, lying because I knew she was right, but I just had to get up and move around .

I stood in the bathroom and looked at my diaphoretic, unshaven face. I couldn’t just lay there. Something weird was happening to me. I waited 5 maybe 10 minutes and got back in bed.

“Are you okay?” my wife asked’

“I’m fine.”

Ten minutes later the same thing happened again, and ten minutes after that again, and again… It was a nightmare. It felt like I had lost my mind, and like a dog with a ball on the other side of a very high fence would never retrieve it. I begged my wife to go home. She wouldn’t leave. I didn’t want her to see me this way. The nurses didn’t know what was happening and kept suggesting that I take more morphine. Four long hours later, when the surgeon finally finished his next two operations and came in to see me, I was finally back to normal.

The next day I figured out what happened. The anesthetic, Droperidol, triggered an akithesia, an abnormal, uncontrollable movement disorder that originated in the extrapyramidal part of my brain. Droperidol is from the same family as Haloperidol, a major tranquilizer to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorders etc. Haloperidol can cause the same symptoms that I experienced. Until this happened, I never imagined the hell my poor patients were going through when they had side effects from the medication I was giving them.

Not being able to control oneself is a horrible experience. Imagine having voices that try to control you, or a delusion that people are trying to kill you, or panic attacks so bad that you’re sweating, your heart’s pounding, you can’t think straight, and you’ll do almost ANYTHING to get it to stop.

For anyone to ever minimize the pain of mental illness is a travesty, yet insurance companies almost always separate treatment for “medical” problems with treatment for “psychological” problems. For the millionth time, let me remind them that the brain is connected to the rest of our bodies.

Any thoughts about being out of control or how our medical care system works or doesn’t work?