#Shortage of psychiatrists

[umemiyan]

the good news is that i got my prescription and it should be ready soon but it’ll be too late in the day to take it so i got a cold brew in the meantime to see what happens lmao

[smrtelnaaleziva]

i can feel i am on the brink of another psychotic episode & i am so scared & i have zero idea what to do to stop it

[aropride]

'ouh Well you have to jump thru 20 hoops to get ur adhd meds just in case you just want 2 use them recreationally' Girl if there's anyone in the world willing to deal with all the shit u have to do to get adhd meds let em have them honestly give me my fucking concerta before i lose my mind

[drawnecromancy]

I'm either going to post a lot more or a lot less in the coming weeks for reasons outside of my control

[obstinatecondolement]

Should finally be able to restart the most important of my meds, providing there are no further issues with supply in my pharmacy and/or the psychiatrist not calling me back.

[kalamity-jayne]

Damn, the ADHD gods are not on my side this week. I have been forsaken by forces of executive functioning.

[lemonsandmorelemons]

Damn menstrual cycles really do have an impact on how and when ADHD meds work... No wonder sometimes when I take them they seem to do barely anything

[ryanthedemiboy]

It's one of the days where I keep crying over nothing and I hate it

[feekins]

.

[dentixvoxel]

if the GP office nurses deicde to write me another recipe for 36mg of concerta instead of the 40mg methylphenidate generic then i think I'll just combust

[gothicprep]

I wish I could remember who said it, but when I was reading about the adderall shortage & the adjacent issue of insurance being very unreliable for adult adhd, I found a quote from a psychiatrist which said something like, “people think adhd is a childhood illness because when a kid has it, it’s your problem. when an adult has it, it’s their problem.”

it’s in the sweet spot of things that sound like meaningless statements on the surface but actually elucidate a lot. if you’re a parent, and your 12 y/o kid forgot which day the garbage is picked up for the 30th week in a row, you notice. if you’re 24, living on your own, and forgot garbage day again, it’s not really the kind of thing you tell people about. unless you have a roommate that’s annoyed with you for this, and they’re more likely to read this as either dumb or malicious.

[arabriddler]

hello !! hope you're doing well !!

I was just wondering who all (besides the ones already shown) is in your AU? is there anyone you haven't talked about yet but would like to?

If not, feel free to talk about whatever you'd like !! Or maybe share some silly fun facts. I love fun facts

Hello!! I don’t know if Harley counts since I’ve drawn her sometimes but I haven’t talked about her. This is about her before becoming Harley Quinn, when she was just Harleen Quinzel. Harleen grew up in Brooklyn. She’s the older sister to two small roudy twin brothers. She had a dad who taught her self defense, and a mother who was often away on a business trip. She has an almost average life, until college when problems arose. Harleen wanted to be a psychiatrist. She wishes she could say it’s because of genuine passion to help people, but it was just simple curiosity. Human minds fascinated her. They were too complicated, and she liked to think about them plenty. she studied psychiatry but soon grew to understand that maybe her dream might not be … manageable. She’s passionate about the field, and knows plenty about psychiatry, but she knew enough to realize she probably had ADHD which made college hard for her. She found it hard to keep focus and often missed deadlines and the such. she graduated with a low GPA and couldn’t work as a psychiatrist. It made her miserable for some time but she quickly picked herself up and realized she could at least pursue nursing, and soon enough she started working as a nurse at mental hospitals. Despite the work and stress, Harleen enjoyed the job. She was always on her feet, running around, and she found company with fellow patients ( some didn’t like her, but some did, and she got along well with them ). One day, her boss told her about Gotham City. The city has a bad reputation and the asylum in it needs a lot of refinement. The mayor of Gotham started a new program that recruits people from outside of Gotham to come work there for some time and help rebuild the city. The boss told her she was the perfect fit because of her passion. She agreed, not knowing that the boss wanted to send her away because her enthusiasm annoyed her coworkers. Gotham proved to be a handful… the Gothamites weren’t fond of the mayor’s program, so she found it hard to get along with them, and Arkham was even worse than she imagined. Absolutely no care and staff shortage and all… she vowed to give it her all, and eventhough she was assigned much work, she decided she’d prove herself.

for now, she’s taking care of a handful of Arkham inmates like Edward Nygma, Oswald Cobblepot, Peyton Wesker, and The Joker. She hopes this experience will improve her skills.

[copperbadge]

Did you end up dropping the saffron to see if you could detect a difference, and if so what was your conclusion?

For context, Anon is asking about saffron supplements' possible benefit for people with ADHD -- funnily enough, the saffron my mother gave me is culinary and totally unrelated. I've had it for about a year and just now got round to cooking with it.

The supplemental saffron is something I heard about from a parent of a couple of kids with ADHD. She was having trouble getting their meds during the shortage, and she said she'd heard saffron could help, so she'd tried that. She said she'd seen some reduction in the hyperactivity more than she'd seen an increase in focus.

I'm skeptical of holistic and herbal treatments for medical conditions mainly because when something non-pharmaceutical works, modern pharma tends to co-opt it and turn it into medication very quickly. I was encouraged mainly because she wasn't a crunchy No Prescriptions parent, she WANTED her kids to have their meds, she was just trying to get them anything that'd help in the meantime.

So I dug around and found that a study had been done in Spain that seemed to indicate 30mg of saffron, as a once-daily supplement, has some kind of impact on ADHD neurology. It was a short study and a small sample size, but the nice thing about saffron is we know its long-term effects, so the only real harm is being out $20 for a bottle of 30mg pills. (It is tough to find 30mg saffron supplements that don't look like a cult is making and selling them, and herbal remedies aren't subject to strict QA controls, so the real risk is you'll get pills with Something Else in them.)

But I did some tinkering, and I found that the best application for me is to take the saffron with an Adderall, where it seems to act as a kind of boost. I take 10mg instant-release twice daily but occasionally I take 20mg in the morning, something the psychiatrist gave me permission to do. Saffron plus 10mg Adderall hits a really good level for me; 20mg Adderall is occasionally helpful; saffron plus 20mg Adderall is Oh Dear Too Much.

Ultimately there's not a great way for me to test it while accounting for the placebo effect, although being fair to me that's not something I've been super subject to in the past. I notice a subtle boost with the saffron, and when I had to refill it I deliberately went without for a few weeks to see if I noticed a decline. I did have a few moments throughout that period of "Jeez, has my Adderall stopped working?" but mostly it just felt like a slower, gentler onset of effects. I've also tried taking saffron without the Adderall on weekends, to see if it improved my focus; I'd do something like take the saffron but pack a couple of Adderall, decamp from my place to the library or a cafe, and do some writing. Certainly saffron alone doesn't have the "well, I felt that kick in" effect Adderall does, so I wouldn't want to depend on it alone, but I generally didn't have to take the meds to focus when it was just something mellow like writing.

I suspect results may vary, since I was diagnosed with Inattentive, not Hyperactive or Mixed, and the saffron is meant to work on the hyperactive aspect. But yeah, it seems to have an effect for me that I miss when I don't take it. It's in one of those weird inbetween situations where we have some research but not enough, so I encourage folks to research it, try it for themselves, and just be healthily skeptical and cautious when doing so.

[boag]

I was diagnosed with adhd as a child and I relate to a lot of adhd traits obviously but when people say stimulants are supposed to calm people with adhd down instead of making them all wired and hyper like the average person gets….. wdym I got put on adderall in elementary school and took it nonstop til I was 18 and still do periodically when I need it but it has never “calmed me down” . It wakes me up just like coffee does and just like meth did when I got hooked on meth bc I couldn’t get adderall anymore due to the shortage . Is that like a real thing? Is your brain chemistry really supposed to react differently to stimulants if you have adhd??? Bc if so I think I was fully misdiagnosed with adhd at that appointment as a kid bc my child psychiatrist didn’t think girls could be autistic or smth .

[runawaymun]

small good news update! Medication mention CW

Just finished my visit with the new psychiatrist and he is so understanding and I'm so relieved. I was really expecting to have to advocate harder and for it to be exhausting but it just...wasn't? And the ADHD somehow finally made it onto my chart. IDK who put it there but it was there somehow prior to the psychiatry visit. And he figured that there had been a lot of mistakes on my chart regarding psychiatric care (especially with the ADHD because while I do have the adderall it's one tablet of the quick release, when normally you'd be prescribed two -- one in the morning and one in the afternoon) so he swapped me over to the XR, which rather than wearing off around 1-2pm, should last me until 6-7pm. Which is just........AHHHHHHH.

And he is having a social worker call me to put me on board with an in-network community psychiatrist for long term care, rather than turning me back over to my PCP -- which is just....it means more stable care.

I'm just so fucking relieved. He was so understanding and sympathetic and like, once I explained how well my meds worked for me he was like "awesome, then that's what we're doing" like??? AHHHHHH.

Things are just finally falling into place. I was so worried about possibly being denied my Adderall and the ADHD not making it onto the chart and feeling like I was really at the whim of whatever psychiatrist whether or not they decided I need a formal evaluation or anything, and all the hoops I might have to jump through, and now things are okay...like I really genuinely can start thinking about steady work again because there's no longer a worry that I possibly might lose my medication in the future.

There's still, obviously, the shortage issue. But that's minor compared to the possibility of being denied the meds at a psychiatric care level. This is just so much more manageable now.

[sophieinwonderland]

Good psychology and psychiatry needs to acknowledge that culture isn't just spatial, but temporal

There was a whole generation that grew up on black and white TV. The technology of the time altered their dreams so that they dreamt in black and white. Many still do to this day.

But this culture that led to this situation is dead. Children will no longer be born into a world where their dreams will be influenced by only having access to black and white television.

Plural systems 40 years ago didn't have support networks. There was no internet, and no one wanted to talk about hearing voices or feeling like people in their head were taking control of their body.

With the advent of the internet, this culture too is dead, and it's for the best.

Now, systems have access to other systems. We have an environment where we won't be judged, or if we are, it won't affect our relationships with our friends or family outside of the internet until we're ready to come out. We're safe and can support each other. And when systems do come out, they can feel much more comfortable with themselves in doing so.

And this also goes for many DID and OSDD systems as well. The shame attached to many of the symptoms of DID is less pervasive because of community support.

But psychiatry isn't acknowledging that the culture of isolation of the 80s and 90s is largely dead now.

When older doctors see kids coming in who have self-diagnosed and aren't ashamed of themselves, they assume that the children of the internet age should be behaving like the children of past generations. But our own generation isn't that generation.

You're not fake just because you aren't ashamed of what you are and what you experience.

You're not fake because you don't act like the last generation of plurals who didn't have access to the support networks we do today.

And psychiatry HAS to keep up with the times. It has to acknowledge that it can't apply the same standards of the pre-internet era to the post-internet era, because our culture today is radically different from theirs.

And we also need to talk about the mental health crisis when it comes to dissociative disorders that led us here.

There is no mass number of people being misdiagnosed with dissociative disorders. In fact, many studies have shown that people dissociative disorders are more likely to be misdiagnosed with Schizophrenia, and the ones who end up correctly diagnosed have to spend an average of 6 years before getting the correct diagnosis.

For decades, experts have been estimating that the number of people with DID was actually close to 3% of the population. In the US, that's about 9 million people. That's an overwhelming number of mostly-undiagnosed DID systems when so many psychiatrists have been given zero training in treating it.

The shortage of healthcare isn't because of some group of boogeymen "fakers" who are stealing resources.

It's because our culture changed. More systems with dissociative disorders became aware of being systems and are seeking help they need. They don't feel shame at their symptoms like they once would have. And our psychiatric institutions have failed them.

This could have been avoided if more psychiatrists had been trained to diagnose and treat dissociative disorders because they knew that this was a problem.

Instead of acknowledging their own failings on this matter, they are doubling down and fakeclaiming systems publicly for not being ashamed enough of themselves, like "real" systems should be.

TikTokers are not responsible for a lack of resources for systems. A psychiatric institution that ignored all the warning and attempts to raise awareness about the true frequency of these disorders is.