Yeah! People have actually visited my site. Thank you! I welcome suggestions, by the way. In particular, I don’t want to turn people off with my tagline, and my naive concept of mental harmony as the key to mental health. Works for me, but maybe not for others. Let me know if it’s too much.

I suppose it’s predictable that as people visit, I begin to feel self-conscious. As much as I believe that my history might help others, it also seems presumptuous to say so. Just to fill in a little, my background as a physician both gives me perspective on psychiatry as a field, and makes me feel bad about myself for making the mistake of trusting it too much. It seems like I should have known better than to get so caught up in the medication/therapy cycle, knowing how much it has been to my detriment over the long run. My clinical work was surgical, and I got used to the idea that you could effect improvement with medical care. With psychiatry, however, the results are much less positive and harder to pin down. I know that now, but at first my expectation was that I would take the right drug(s) and all would be well. I should have understood that drugs can help a little but are not enough by themselves. I made more progress once I expanded my sights and began other approaches, including CBT and meditation. Now I suspect the medication step could have been skipped altogether. But I’ll never know for sure.

By the way, I don’t practice medicine anymore. My neck won’t allow me to operate, and besides my mental health is a little too fragile to tolerate the stress. I wouldn’t be blogging and opening up so much if I had any plans to practice again. It would expose me to accusations of ‘physician impairment’, among other things. I imagine that is why psychiatry programs passed on bringing me on board, back when I thought a good plan was to enter the field. I don’t know if they saw the advantage that I did in being both a consumer/client/user/patient and a psychiatrist; but they surely saw the risk.

Maybe I’ll be more useful from the sidelines. It is encouraging to get a few people stopping by. I really do have some strongly held and possibly well-informed ideas about medications and psychiatry. Not only did I go to medical school, by the way, but I also spent time in graduate school studying neurophysiology. So I’ve had ‘fun’ reading about the drugs and their interactions with neurons. Among other things, they are far less ‘selective’ than we are often led to believe.

Well, this is just a rambling post in response to the comments here, and those I read on Beyond Meds, courtesy of Gianna. I’ll reiterate my desire for advice on how to make this blog useful to others. Thank you for stopping by.

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