Why did my therapist berate me for wanting antidepressants?
I have one experience of therapy. It was marriage therapy. I went with an open mind.
I ended up being told that I wasnt trying hard enough. SO I did as I was told and it had no effect. In the end it took someone who is operating outside of the professional psychological world to point out that I was married to someone who loved arguments and that the only solution was to leave.
Research demonstrates that this is not true. It’s just a personal opinion that’s founded on anecdotal evidence.
_________________
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. – Satan and TwilightPrincess
OK Aspie1 did your therapist try using CBT with you?
That's what the princess's article was about. I would be open to trying that, as its an actual solution to the problem.
Last edited by klanka on 01 Jul 2022, 3:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
lostonearth35
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That's what the princess's article was about. I would be open to trying that, as its an actual solution to the problem.
Therapy can be a bit of trial and error. It’s most important to find a therapist you like and can connect with.
I found CBT helpful. My therapist is flexible, though, and is intent on my particular needs.
Some on here prefer different types of therapy. I haven’t tried others because I couldn’t find someone close by who takes my insurance.
_________________
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. – Satan and TwilightPrincess
That's what the princess's article was about. I would be open to trying that, as its an actual solution to the problem.
Basically, she'd ask questions, like the usual "How did that make you feel?", acting like they were sincere information requests. Or she'd listen to my weekly recap. In both cases, she was conditioning me to say what she wanted to hear, like Ivan Pavlov's dogs. If it was, she'd give me a compliment. If it wasn't, she'd berate me, mock me, or pretend not to understand me. Come to think of it, CBT and ABA are more alike than different: CBT trains a patient to feel the right emotions, while ABA trains a patient to make the right statements, with neither really helping the underlying depression and other misery.
I eventually got good at keeping her placated with "neutral" statements, the ones that got me neither praise nor blame. Most of them were things I memorized from textbooks and library books, and pretended to be interested in her take on what I read about. I guess ABA has no planned reactions, good or bad, when the patient is talking about atomic nuclei.
Examples:
Randomly guessing an emotion word correctly = "good".
Describing being emotionally abused by my parents = "bad".
Talking about radioactive uranium isotopes = "neutral".
I had bad side effects from antidepressants as well. Of course, they work well for some people.
_________________
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. – Satan and TwilightPrincess
"But why didn't you just get up and walk out?", you might ask. Because she'd narc on me to my parents, and I'd be punished very hard. And excusing myself to the restroom, sitting there until there was 5 minutes left, then lying to her I had gas/flatulence, didn't occur to me. At least, if she told my parents about that, I could lie to them saying I ate a bad burrito during lunch at school.
I found this article online. It says that the "increased suicide risk" from antidepressants for youths is irrelevant when the preexisting risk of suicide is already there. Which was me at that age. In fact, I wanted to die as early as age 5 (die naturally, that is, as I didn't know suicide was possible back then). And I had crude suicide plans since age 8.
In other words, my therapist should given me at least Prozac. (Good stuff, like Cymbalta, Effexor, and Zoloft, let alone Ambien, is unattainable for minors.) My family did "commit the time or resources to ensure their children have frequent appointments", but it was with their flying monkey, not someone actually willing to help me. So, her actual goal was to reform me ABA-style for my parents, not improve my quality of life. Alcohol, cold medications, and inhalants served that purpose instead.
Last edited by Aspie1 on 24 Jul 2022, 9:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
In other words, my therapist should given me at least Prozac. (Good stuff, like Cymbalta, Effexor, and Zoloft, let alone Ambien, is unattainable for minors.) My family did "commit the time or resources to ensure their children have frequent appointments", but it was with their flying monkey, not someone actually willing to help me. So, her actual goal was to reform me ABA-style for my parents, not improve my quality of life. Alcohol, cold medications, and inhalants served that purpose instead.
Your therapist shouldn’t have given you anything because she wasn’t a doctor.
Maybe your therapist didn’t think that you were “a significant risk of suicide,” and she feared that encouraging you to take medication would worsen your depression to the point of making that a reality.
You haven’t committed suicide, so maybe she was right. It’s impossible to say.
_________________
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. – Satan and TwilightPrincess
Maybe your therapist didn’t think that you were “a significant risk of suicide,” and she feared that encouraging you to take medication would worsen your depression to the point of making that a reality.
You haven’t committed suicide, so maybe she was right. It’s impossible to say.
I realize she wasn't a doctor. But she could have referred me to one. Plus, in my state, you don't need to be an MD to prescribe antidepressants, unless it's a Schedule 2 pill. An NP or even an RN can prescribe those things too. But again, "flying monkey".
And who says it's my physical body typing this, and not me manipulating the keyboard telepathically? Oooooh!
Current understanding of anti-depressants might be a lot different from how they were understood in the 90s. A 12-year-old kid asking for them back then might have had a different connotation. But I don't think that sufficiently explains the response you described.
As a rule, I check my contribution to a situation before criticizing others. I suggest that you first consider whether your attitude was off. Maybe she was responding not just to your request for a prescription, but to how she might have interpreted that request in terms of your overall attitude during that time. Please don't take that personally, because we're talking about a 12-year-old kid. That isn't you now. They're two different people, with the elder having to carry the memories of the younger. For many of us (me included), those memories can be rough if we haven't learned how to put them where they belong.
The other possibility is that the psychologist blundered epically in how she responded to your request. I can see how being berated for that long by somebody who you thought was on your side could have stuck with you, if not traumatized you.
Either way, I'd suggest making it a priority to stop ruminating about that. If you ruminate about other difficult memories, do some reading on rumination.
All the best with it!
Back when I first asked for antidepressants, I was a 12-year-old disgusting weakling. No family therapist wants to help somebody so pathetic. (I'm attacking MYSELF, not other members, so don't issue me a warning, you mods.) So no wonder mine mocked me, berated me, and denied me the antidepressants that could have helped me.
By contrast, when I asked my current primary doctor for antidepressants, I work for the local government as a computer tech, a respected job, relatively speaking, and have access to skilled attorneys and other resources. So my antidepressant request comes from a respected worker who can destroy careers, rather than from a weakling abused by his own family.
A psychologist berating a 12-year-old boy just because he's "weak" would be one of the most extreme reasons. I'd start with more likely reasons before assuming something so cynical.
If this is weighing on you all these years later, I'd suggest talking to a therapist about it.
The simplest explanation I can see is that she was a bad therapist. Good therapists don't usually berate their clients.
It's common for health professionals to dislike it when their clients suggest interventions. I guess it interferes with the appearance of leadership in the doctor-patient relationship. Some health professionals feel very threatened when the client seems to be muscling in on "their" supposed area of expertise, and if the health professional is a poser who doesn't know as much as they pretend, they might fear their game is being exposed. I think there was something in a Dale Carnegie book about influencing people that advised conning the other person into thinking your idea was their idea. Carnegie seems to have felt that most people are gullible to anything that feeds their ego like that, so much so that they won't notice it wasn't their idea. Not that I'd suggest using such a ploy. I only mention it as evidence that a lot of people seem to need to hold onto an illusion that they're smarter or "better" than they really are.
When the client asks for a drug that has known recreational uses, the health professional is likely to be suspicious about hidden motives. It might not have helped to refer to them as "happy pills." That suggests a poor understanding of what the drugs are, and may increase their suspicion that they've got a junkie, though of course it's perfectly possible to know a lot about them and still use the vernacular term for them.
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