So, I’m Crazy…Nothing New

I’m saying this is the South. And we’re proud of our crazy people. We don’t hide them up in the attic. We bring ‘em right down to the living room and show ‘em off. See, Phyllis, no one in the South ever asks if you have crazy people in your family. They just ask what side they’re on.

— Julia, Designing Women

I saw the psychiatrist yesterday and I’m still processing in what he had to say. Basically he said that he looked over the tests for ADD and decided that I have such a mild case of it that it’s not worth pursuing therapy or medication for. I’m really not sure I agree with him after making my way through half of Women With Attention Deficit Disorder, by Sari Solden, which I intend to finish reading because I think I’ve gotten some insight from it so far.

He also asked me if I’d talked to my regular therapist about increasing my therapy sessions. Apparently he’d mentioned this to me last time, but I don’t recall it. He things going 3 to 4 weeks between sessions is too long and he feels I need more regular sessions — at least every other week. So, I made a note of that to discuss it next week when I see her. Plus, I’ve agreed to mention to her how upset I was with our last session.

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What Do The Simple Folk Do?

The other night, NG noticed I was reading Women with Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life by Sari Solden and she inquired about it. I commented that I’m it quite informative and eye-opening. I don’t get the results back from my testing until next Tuesday, but I can definitely relate to the women used as examples in the first six chapters and I can see myself in the symptoms listed.

However, the one thing these kinds of books never seem to have, I’ve noticed, is an example of what is normal to compare the abnormal to. The book was written by a woman who suffers from ADD for women who suffer from ADD so it occurs to me that if you do have ADD, you don’t know what is a non-ADD life to compare your symptoms to. You can’t possibly know you are abnormal; more than likely you have gone your whole life thinking you are normal, that this madness is normal, unless someone else has told you it’s not.

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Wanted: Personal Assistant For Overwhelmed Person

O.K. I am not a gadget-a-holic. At least I don’t think I am. I have a Palm Z22, which is the simplest Palm model you can get because I only wanted to use it for what Palms were originally designed for — PIM (Personal Information Management). You know, I needed something to keep my phone numbers, addresses, to-do list, and calendar in…and I’m really not that good at keeping up with all of that.

In fact, I’m horrible at keeping up with all of that. I need a better system. I can’t figure out how people keep up with everything. I was just saying to my mom last night that I was super-anxious about the fact that the property tax bill had shown up last month and is due in two payments — one on October 1rst and one on April 1rst. What bothers me is how am I going to remember to pay on these dates. I can’t put the bill anywhere because if it gets put inside anything or behind anything, I know it’ll get lost and forgotten. I have to have it somewhere I’ll see it every day until April 1rst.

She told me that I need some sort of system. Clearly, that’s the problem.

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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.)

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