Know One
1/5
Robbed of 10+ years of life because of a hasty and careless misdiagnosis that prevented me from receiving much-needed help for nearly 5 years for the real issues I had been diagnosed with by competent psychiatrists.
The 20+ drugs thrown at me and the 6 he tried to keep me on turned me into a drooling zombie and led to severe akathisia (something I assumed was really bad anxiety until I learned about this condition) that led to multiple suicide attempts. I didn’t realize until years later the meds were the cause of this torment.
Until I finally got off the class of meds that were causing so much agony, every day was waking up into an insufferable nightmare. I would wake up, there would be about 5 seconds of peace, and then that DREADFUL would begin to quickly wash over me. Whatever the opposite of euphoria washing over you is basically what it felt like.
I didn’t have any clue what akathisia was at the time, but I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone. It would slowly fade at night to a level where I at least didn’t want to jump out of my skin. But this made going to bed awful, because I knew what I would be waking up to the next day. This cycle continued for roughly a year with a plethora of other maddening side-effects, but none as awful as the akathisia.
Alan’s initial goal seemed to be medicating me into oblivion. He never listened, no eye-contact, always staring at his computer with disinterest and a soulless lack of compassion. His diagnosis was questioned by a qualified psychiatrist who claimed it was likely something else, but unfortunately he had to leave on holiday and his opinion was dismissed.
B’s diagnosis was a death sentence to the life I had. I would have rather died had I known what anguish the next decade had in store to fully understand what really happened.
In hindsight, he had no context to possibly comprehend what was truly happening. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop him from haphazardly diagnosing and then throwing pills at me to treat something I didn’t have but DID then have side-effects that he threw more pills at. At that point all hope was lost, because now I did appear to be a crazy person to any outside observer.
I went from merely being in an unfamiliar, disorienting, altered state of consciousness to genuinely acting crazy as a result of the side-effects of all the pills being thrown at me—seemingly at random—and with little to no explanation of what they were or their pharmacology. In hindsight, having the right person to guide me through that experience would have been massively cathartic instead of traumatic.
B’s arrogance with immediately assuming that he knew what was going on prevented any hope of getting other opinions aside from the skeptical psychiatrist who vehemently disagreed with the diagnosis but was oddly brushed off.
There was no getting through to this man, given both the state I was in combined with his automatic assumption that he knew everything, along with his demeanor that I was “just another crazy person” not worth listening to.
The more I’ve learned over the last decade about the field of psychiatry, the more I realized I can’t pin all the blame on him given that the major issues are systematic throughout the field.
The diagnoses that are not well-understood are borderline pseudoscience that lead to a game of DSM-V pill roulette. It’s a relatively new field of science, so it’s really a lack of data, knowledge, wisdom, and awareness that is mostly the culprit.
I saw many psychiatrists, specialists, therapists, psychologists, guides, healers, gurus, yogis, etc and did finally figure out what happened to me. It was way beyond the scope of Mr. Berkowitz’s training and capacity to understand. Nonetheless, it would have been nice if he had the humility to realize he didn’t know what was going on and instead sought counsel with someone experienced in these matters.
There ARE good psychiatrists and guides out there, but in my experience they are rare, and this man was not one of them.
