Part II: Misdiagnosed as Mad as a Peanut
Oct 26 2006 | Comments 2
A film by Andy Lee. Thanks z0tl!
liz | 4:52 PM | Uncategorized
The Trouble with Spikol | Make Major Moves | PW Style | Cup o'Joel
A film by Andy Lee. Thanks z0tl!
liz | 4:52 PM | Uncategorized
Liz Spikol was born in Philadelphia sometime in the 20th century. She started writing about her experience as a person with mental illness in 1999, while employed at Philadelphia Weekly as the paper’s managing editor. Aside from serving as that paper’s web editor, music editor, staff writer, senior editor, executive editor and a host of other random roles that she couldn’t make up her mind about, she has also worked as a Spanish teacher, as a Certified Peer Specialist during Philly’s system-wide transformation and as a communications specialist for a prison reform organization. Currently, she works at the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania and writes book reviews for PW. This blog — named one of the Top 10 Bipolar Blogs of 2007 and 2008 by PsychCentral — is about medications, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, SAD (and many other acronyms), mad pride, Big Pharma, celebrities, hospitals, stigma and the recovery movement. And other stuff.
These videos were great, informative and unbelievable. Thank you.
Well done and if 100% factual very scary! I am browsing this site because I am a parent of an adult child who is diagnosed as schizoaffective-and while he never heard voices-it was amazing how every mental health professional tried to get him to say he heard voices. It was as though they wanted to have him fit into every postive and negative symptom of classical schizophrenia. During his first hospitalization I had insurance that covered him-I soon found out there was a lifetime limit of $5,000-so when the hospital/doctors found this out-he was quickly declared okay to go home-on discharge they gave him a double dose of Prolyxin IM-(no Cogentin was prescribed) so he suffered every extrapyramidal side effect possible-really too much to detail-but his drugs were changed so frequently over the first 3 years of his illness I lost count-just look up every possible drug used to treat schizophrenia and he has been on it. After 8 years of treatment, he is still ill-and continues to have severe episodes of paranoia. There are no longer bouts of serious depression or mania-and other than the paranoia he is “okay”. I continue to hope that he becomes stable-at least to where he understands he is ill-he has refused to acknowledge this and still claims he is not ill. This makes his compliance some times questionable. Every time he is doing well he stops his meds, “as he doesn’t need them”. It ends the same way-a serious set back-usually hospitilazation and the struggle to yet try another combination of the drugs he has already been on throughout his illness as what was working-now doesn’t seem to be working. I still have difficult time believing that insurance companies are permitted to have these caps on metal illness–it reflects our society mind set as a whole-”If you have a mental illness-it really isn’t real-like cancer-so it is not serious or that important.”
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