We all can hope you can get help for your PTSD. It affects all your loved ones and I know they must feel hopeless but it appears there are methods that can help (meds, therapy, your father's professional knowledge and experience. I do pray for you and your family's future.
Thank you very much for your kindness, Bonnie. I have been trying so hard to get help but the problem is so much of it has been ineffective.
I'm on psychiatrist #3 at the moment. The first psychiatrist was only interested in prescribing me a drug I was too afraid to take given its potential to increase my suicidal ideation. Then the second psychiatrist tried me on a bunch of drugs, few of which helped at all. (Propranolol was somewhat helpful for awhile but its effects have really diminished at this point.) He eventually dropped me as a client when I was resistant to being hospitalized a second time at a really terrible mental hospital. He also advised Sally not to marry me - something I'll never be able to forgive him for. I'm still very, very angry with him for doing that and for wasting so much of my time. My third psychiatrist I like quite a bit - he took the time to properly diagnose me, unlike the first two - and he seems to know what he's doing, but now one of the drugs he prescribed, he's instructed me to start titrating off of because it terribly increased my suicidal ideation and was giving me the energy to potentially act on the impulses. I've been worse lately than ever before in this regard.
The Ketamine infusion therapy that I tried for a bit gave me some mild relief but ultimately I couldn't get the full course of treatment and the fourth session put me in a mental hospital for a week.
I've had 2 therapists, one of which I've now dropped since he ultimately came to the conclusion he couldn't help me and urged me to just go to a very expensive clinic-resort. He was also the one who referred me to terrible psychiatrist #2. My current therapist I've had for years is wonderful, I like her quite a bit, and she has helped me some, but in general I regard talk therapy as just sort of a band-aid for a gushing wound. Talking with someone on Zoom doesn't do much considering these various panic attacks, depressive episodes, and constant hyperarousal of my senses and emotions. I need the right combination of drugs which I haven't figured out yet.
And to be honest, my father's professional expertise often has not been helpful. He's pushed drugs on me that haven't helped me and at one point he admitted he was drawing on PTSD thinking/training from the 1980s. I think he is too biased from his focus on alcoholism, depression, and research. He's not as much of an expert on PTSD as he seems to think he is. He's also getting older and now I generally just question his judgment and memory. Many times lately he's accused me of things which I never did as a teenager and even recently as an adult, so I question his ability to analyze me and advise the situation. We've argue a whole lot about this, sometimes very passionately and loudly.
So I remain feeling pretty hopeless, with largely only getting relief from drugs that are only quasi-legal and whose effects are not fully understood, with me having to experiment and figure it out on my own just with Sally's help - particularly THC.
Wow.
It was pretty "wow!" 😅
Yeah. I was really, really bad. And we’ve had a few echoes of it since that have only been a little bad.
We all can hope you can get help for your PTSD. It affects all your loved ones and I know they must feel hopeless but it appears there are methods that can help (meds, therapy, your father's professional knowledge and experience. I do pray for you and your family's future.
Thank you very much for your kindness, Bonnie. I have been trying so hard to get help but the problem is so much of it has been ineffective.
I'm on psychiatrist #3 at the moment. The first psychiatrist was only interested in prescribing me a drug I was too afraid to take given its potential to increase my suicidal ideation. Then the second psychiatrist tried me on a bunch of drugs, few of which helped at all. (Propranolol was somewhat helpful for awhile but its effects have really diminished at this point.) He eventually dropped me as a client when I was resistant to being hospitalized a second time at a really terrible mental hospital. He also advised Sally not to marry me - something I'll never be able to forgive him for. I'm still very, very angry with him for doing that and for wasting so much of my time. My third psychiatrist I like quite a bit - he took the time to properly diagnose me, unlike the first two - and he seems to know what he's doing, but now one of the drugs he prescribed, he's instructed me to start titrating off of because it terribly increased my suicidal ideation and was giving me the energy to potentially act on the impulses. I've been worse lately than ever before in this regard.
The Ketamine infusion therapy that I tried for a bit gave me some mild relief but ultimately I couldn't get the full course of treatment and the fourth session put me in a mental hospital for a week.
I've had 2 therapists, one of which I've now dropped since he ultimately came to the conclusion he couldn't help me and urged me to just go to a very expensive clinic-resort. He was also the one who referred me to terrible psychiatrist #2. My current therapist I've had for years is wonderful, I like her quite a bit, and she has helped me some, but in general I regard talk therapy as just sort of a band-aid for a gushing wound. Talking with someone on Zoom doesn't do much considering these various panic attacks, depressive episodes, and constant hyperarousal of my senses and emotions. I need the right combination of drugs which I haven't figured out yet.
And to be honest, my father's professional expertise often has not been helpful. He's pushed drugs on me that haven't helped me and at one point he admitted he was drawing on PTSD thinking/training from the 1980s. I think he is too biased from his focus on alcoholism, depression, and research. He's not as much of an expert on PTSD as he seems to think he is. He's also getting older and now I generally just question his judgment and memory. Many times lately he's accused me of things which I never did as a teenager and even recently as an adult, so I question his ability to analyze me and advise the situation. We've argue a whole lot about this, sometimes very passionately and loudly.
So I remain feeling pretty hopeless, with largely only getting relief from drugs that are only quasi-legal and whose effects are not fully understood, with me having to experiment and figure it out on my own just with Sally's help - particularly THC.