Tuesday, January 27, 2009

How To Drive Your Psychiatrist Crazy


In Roy's Top Ten Search Phrases, he notes that How to Drive Your Psychiatrist Crazy is a popular search phrase that gets you to Shrink Rap. Okay, I'll bite. So I pressed the link, and there was a list of what you get when you Google "How To Drive Your Psychiatrist Crazy." I went to the first link and found myself at Clown Ministry, and here were listed 10 ways to drive your shrink nuts. Just what I need. And so...:

  1. Demand to sit behind his or her desk every other meeting
  2. Keep your own notes of your psychologist's behaviors and your diagnosis
  3. Prescribe medication to your psychologist
  4. spend the first half of the sesion drawing a picture of your psychologist, spend the second half drilling holes through it with a pencil
  5. Ask to go to the bathroom every time he or she asks a question
  6. Every time you give an answer ask “Am I cured yet?”
  7. Bring a ‘seeing eye turtle’ to therapy sessions
  8. Speak to your imaginary friend instead of the psychologist
  9. Bring all converstaion back to your childhood whenever it strays away from it
  10. Lie Blatantly about Everything
  11. Tell your psychiatrist that your name is Adrian Monk.
Is there more to say?

22 comments:

Esther said...

Why would you pay someone upwards of $150 an hour so you could sit there and mock them when you could make some friends and do that for free?

NeoNurseChic said...

Hello! Been awhile since I've been here! Sorry about that! Anyway - loved the post - caught it on a link on Twitter. (My new hang out for the last 6-7 months or so!)

My boyfriend would love this post. He occasionally brings up what he would do if he ever went to a therapist of some sort. And everything he says when on that topic is about messing with their mind. I have asked him why he feels the need to do this, but haven't gotten a great answer yet. Mostly the conversation is highly amusing.

Hope all of you are well!

Take care!
Carrie :)

the therapist said...

Yes, unfortunatly it's extremely hard to better a therapist. You spot a defence mechanism before it even sits down.

Anonymous said...

It makes me incredibly anxious when my therapist starts writing in my chart during the session. Kind of like a teacher writing something bad in your "permanent record." I don't think anyone can actually read my doc's handwriting though, so maybe I shouldn't stress over it..

Rach said...

I was actually going to ask my psychiatrist about that. He must write a full page, double sided back and front in a 45 minute session. I'm trying to figure out what he's writing - his grocery list? His master's thesis, one page at a time?
Tomorrow. I will find out tomorrow.

Anonymous said...

Funny, though nobody would actually DO those things, would they?

My psychiatrist never writes ANYTHING down; he REMEMBERS it all. I don't know how he manages to do that, but he does.

Anonymous said...

Now your blog will show up when people do a search on "seeing-eye turtle"! :)

The Girl said...

Or "How your psychiatrist can drive a seeing-eye turtle crazy." ;)

Fat Doctor said...

Speechless.

Anonymous said...

Y'all are kidding, aren't you? They write during sessions?

Mine never writes anything - of course, never remembers much either. But I've never had a shrink write anything down except during the first session.

Unknown said...

'How to Drive Your Patient Crazy'
1.make it a habit to be at least 15 minutes late.
2.never acknowledge your tardiness
3.should patient bring up the matter, attribute their anger to transference. Tell them they are really angry with their mother or spouse.
4.spend sessions writing everything down so you have a good defense if you are ever sued. make sure not to tell patient this is the real reason.
5.no matter what patient says, relate it back to a story from your own life. that way, you get paid to talk about yourself.
6.have no goals for the therapy. be very vague when patient asks and say: time, it takes time.
7.believe that everything you do or say is part of the therapy or therapeutic. that way you get to "write off' your mistakes.
8. jump onto a bandwagon and never get off. diagnose all your patients with the same thing. that is the fast track to becoming a specialist/expert in your field
9.prescribe a lot of meds and don't ever consider that patients deterioration could be due , in part or in whole, to meds. dismiss all concerns of addiction. as patient gets worse, give more meds.
10. give the patient conflicting messages and deny that they conflict. instead, tell the patient they are not thinking clearly
11.tell the patient that you hope they do not give in to suicidal urges but as you do, consider who to slot into that empty appointment time, just in case
12.pretend that you are together when all your friends, neighbors and yes, even patients know you are not. pretend that it has no bearing on therapy even as you are contemplating suicide yourself
13. never believe that the patient knows anything about themselves that you don't already know.

Dr. Pink Freud said...

Shouldn't it say "psychiatrist" consistently, not "psychologist?"

Dr. Pink Freud said...

Comment on your perception of your psychiatrist's counter-transference issues.

Ask which med school in the bahamas he/she graduated from.

Ask if that's a DSM in your psychiatrist's pocket, or if if he's just happy to see you.

Tell your psychiatrist his/her sex change appears to be going well.

Tell your psychiatrist you're suicidal, and then say, "just kidding...I'm really feeling homicidal...just kidding."

Ask what bar drinks your Xanax goes best with.

Tell your psychiatrist you're available for phone consults on really tough cases.

Pay your psychiatrist and then ask, "How does that make you feel?"

Ask if you can get a discount for multiple personalities.

Ask your psychiatrist to define "normal."

Pay in pennies.

Communicate only with gestures.

Anonymous said...

Good comments No. To add to what you said about how psychiatrist can drive patient crazy:

1. Attribute all side effect complaints to the patient's mental illness worsening.
2. Tell the patient he/she is making up the complaints about side effects.
3. Tell the patient that withdrawal symptoms from psych med withdrawal are minimal and last only two weeks.
4. Tell the patient that withdrawal symptoms are a return of the illness because they last two weeks and one day.
5. Expect the patient tapering off of psych meds to relapse and not be successful in being med free. This is done by the various questions that leave no doubt that you expect him/her to fail.

If the psychiatrist wants to drive the patient super crazy:

1. When he/she complains about a med side effect and gets belligerent because you refuse to believe him/her and blame it on the person's mental illness, involuntarily commit the person to the psych hospital.

Finally, the patient can drive the psychiatrist crazy by showing how much more knowledgeable he/she is about issues like med withdrawal and tapering slowly (10% of the current dose every 3 to 6 weeks vs. the rapid tapers most psychiatrists do which usually lead to severer withdrawal symptoms).

By the way, all the examples I have used are based on patient stories and are not made up. Of course, many psychiatrists (not the shrink rappers) would blow this list off as simply the work of anti psychiatry zealots and scientologists. Whatever.

Unknown said...

I am not a Zealot--I kind of like Rome.
I also prefer Old Mother Hubbard to L. Ron any day.
I am not anti-pych meds. Some of my favorite shrinks take them and it seems to help them.
I am not anti-psychiatry. I am against the games, and I find that psychiatrists generally are very skilled at games, rigging them so that they always win no matter what you say/do. This applies to others in the mental health profession as well. I trained with some very skilled ones so I got to learn all the tricks. If you really want to drive your psychiatrist/mental health specialist crazy, be a member of the club and they will go nuts feeling you are judging everything they do.

Dragonfly said...

A seeing eye turtle? Awesome.

InnocentlyGreen said...

Wow this was terrific! Great job :)

Martian said...

How I drove my psychiatrist crazy.

I asked if the treatment works, does the diagnosis matter? (shrug)
I told him he wasn't supposed to c/t a 15 year Klonopin patient and substitue it with a short-acting benzo (thanks for the withdrawal syndrome).
I wrote a sarcastic letter of complaint on official letterhead pointing out All if hi mistakes that led to the disaster.
I asked who is loyalty was to, the patient or the drug companies.
I explained the ridiculousness of 7 benzo changes in one month.
I told him when someone described themselves as feeling "manic psychotic" over the phone, driving an hour to pick uo the new Saphrus (won't make ya sleepy) was ridiculousness.

I carefully explained the term "manic psychotic" and asked what he did for continuing education.

Finally, and this was the clincher, I told him
I FINALLY got some help from the Internet. And would just like my pills please.

Martian said...

THIS is how you drive your shrink crazy.

Explain each error, in detail, and the grief it caused. Be condescending- "and this is why we don't take people dependent on Klonopin and change them to a short- half life... You see..."

Write him a Sarcastic Letter of Complaint, suggesting we may as well pop some MAOI's chomping on a bag of Cheetos.

Be honest. Then imply that the psychotrist is not. Then prove it.

One more thing: why would you pay tons of money just to drive someone nuts?

Cuz I paid alot of money to be driven nuts. And I don't like the refun policy.

If he ever asked you a question, tell him you can't concentrate. Your thinking about your friend. Who spent years in a state hospital. For Arivan withdrawal.

End each session with "um, can I just get my scripts?"

Anonymous said...

I been changing my psychiatry doctors, and I'm not satisfied, So I'm changing again, they ask why and i say because I want to bond with you. I make the doctors change my medicine, then I cried and over react.to change my medicine again. sometimes i show up crying. sometimes I show up happy. And i look straight into there eyes, ask for there personal cell phone number, And u send text message, asking if I have bipolar depression, or what are like personality disorder.

nobody said...

Thanks it cheered my day. :) Anyways I was sad for no apparent reason after seeing my psych...

Adsa said...

$150 an hour? Someone is getting some cut price psychiatry right there. Where I'm from a psychiatrist who is an accredited fellow will charge almost twice that.

Anyway I laughed out loud at some of the very worn out stereotypical responses to psychiatry. I am married to one, and am in the psychological field myself.

Firstly if you think ANY psychiatrist is interested in "playing games" with you then you are suffering from a delusion. As a medical doctor they are not only bound by the Hippocratic oath "first do no harm", but frankly have much better things to do with their time. Playing "games" is not what medical doctors decide to devote their lives to helping people tend to do.

When you bring Dr. Google along to your session you are wasting your time. I know a lot of doctors smile and say sure lets talk about it, but at the end of the day you are building a trust relationship with the doctor, and arguing about stuff you cherrypicked out of Pubmed is inane.

The guy who says "feeling suicidal then no, homicidal" has not obviously been to jail before, because you will either be going to jail or a locked ward psychiatric institution. People who've been to both will argue quite legitimately which one is worse, and why.

The writing stuff down thing - doctors tend to be a bit on the spectrum in that they remember pretty much all the relevant stuff you say, and form a picture from the dross that comes along with it. They definitely dont need to "take notes".

Oh and the person talking about defense mechanisms obviously knows what they are on about. Anyone who mocks, belittles the efforts of a psychiatrist, argues over semantics or personal theories with them is using a very childish and pointless defense mechanism. This has 2 effects. 1 it closes the communication process and wastes your time and money. 2 it suggests to the person trying to help you that you are more interested in showing how clever you are than solving the problems you came to tackle.