State of Mind

Yesterday I met with the psychiatrist for a med check. This is the first time I’ve done so since 2003, which if anyone is paying attention, means is the first time since I moved to Maine. My GP increased my anti-depressant to the max dose in early 2005 when I complained that it wasn’t working any more and that boost helped for a little bit but I don’t think that they’ve been working well for the last 6 to 9 months again so she had me referred to a psychiatrist since my regular shrink is just a nurse practitioner and can’t prescribe meds.

I already like this guy better than the mild mannered Mr. Bean-look-a-like I saw once every 6 months for 15 minutes in New Orleans. He certainly asked me a lot more questions than Mr. Bean ever did about my childhood, which is when the depression started. He asked me questions about my behaviors then and now about how I think, about why I think the way I do, about my family, about my physical health, etc. Plus, because his office is associated with my GP’s office, he had access through the computer system to all of my medical records since 2004 and all the ones I’d brought from New Orleans and they’d uploaded so he could reference it all and ask me questions.

He had me fill out another one of those questionnaires about how the depression has been affecting my life the last two weeks. You know, how’s my sleep, do I want to hurt myself, do I have interest in my hobbies and interests, is it affecting my work, etc., etc. Apparently, I’ve improved just a tad from a month ago — it’s probably the clean house and light therapy, though I didn’t mention either. (We did discuss that I will need to use the light therapy consistently from September through April though.)

He ordered up a bunch of labs (lots of blood taking and other bodily fluids) to see if I have any deficiencies or something on my inside is off other than the things we already know about that are associated with the IgAN and the fibromyalgia.

Then he made an interesting suggestion and asked me to fill out another questionnaire. He said that it’s possible that I have ADD and was never diagnosed as a child and that the suppression or whatever of trying subconsciously to hide it or make up for it all these years has resulted in the depression and possibly some other psychological issues. Apparently, he saw possible signs in my obsessive list making, my inconsistent distractibility, my short attention span, my desire for neatness but the constant sense of being overwhelmed at trying to accomplish it, my problems tracking conversations, my fidgetiness (and my extreme hatred of meetings), my stressing out in grocery store lines, my inability to shut my mind off (particularly at night), my intense dislike of boredom and yet my masterful art of procrastination, etc. I suppose much of that could be anyone, not just ADD someones.

One of the things that has to be done is that my mother has to fill out an observation questionnaire too. So I called her last night to tell her I was mailing it to her. Of course as soon as I explained she got all defensive skeptical and began her Queen of Denial shtick. (Once she told me to be sure I told my therapist that she wasn’t the one that screwed me up and she pulled me out of therapy in sixth grade because the therapist suggested that my problems my be family-related.) Anyway, my mother insists that if I had/have ADD, it would have been diagnosed when I was a kid, though I don’t know when since I always went to privileged private Christian schools that sort of frowned on that sort of thing and I don’t remember people talking much about learning disabilities back then. In fact, I highly suspect that if anyone had suggested it, that my mother would have freaked out. Thinking back, I went to a school where I was frequently in detention for talking too much, where we were forced to sit in little mini-cubicles along the wall and I was frequently in trouble for trying to communicate with those outside of my boundaries. I was spanked with a big wood paddle by the principal on lots of occasions for acting out, but I was also ahead of my class work-wise and a year younger. Eventually, I figured out how to outsmart the “pace-system” the school taught by and was suspended three times and my parents pulled me from the school. I was put in a public school where I repeated the six-grade work material I’d already done with my classmates and then transfered to another private Christian school that kept me back a year to put me with my age group where I repeated the six-grade course work material for the third time — talk about bored. I was completely socially and intellectually screwed up. I never felt like I quite got my grove back educationally — I always felt like I was struggling to live up to the potential everyone said I had and never quite could.

Personally, I’ve often thought sixth grade — the public school one was when my depression began. (Though my mother says my attitude towards the world around me changed from “everyone loves me” to paranoia and distrust around the age of 6, which is when we moved from Florida to New Orleans — what event might of triggered this specifically, I don’t know. I can’t recall.)

So, anyway, my mother kind of ended the conversation saying something like she was sure that I just want to have something to blame my depression on. While this is in many ways true, mostly I want answers for why I am the way I am and how I can improve myself. I would hope that my mother would want me to be a healthier, better me too. I’ve stumbled around in the darkness far too long. I’m ready for answers.

Tagged as: ADHD, childhood, depression