- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I've read the letters -- I wonder -- maybe she's been slightly misdiagnosed and that's why the meds are being rejected.
The problem is that there are different mental illnesses that present with psychosis. It makes a difference whether they get treated for one or the other.
Here's my experience -- my brother has schizoaffective disorder, which appears almost identical to schizophrenia, but with the added twist of a bipolar component.
If the psychotic part of a schizoaffective patient is treated with anti-psychotics, then you have a bipolar person on anti-psychotics. YOu're only halfway there.
The problem is -- if the mood swings aren't being treated then the person is probably eventually going to reject the anti-psychotic medication as part of a manic or depressive phase and then that person will go back to being fully blown crazy instead of half blown crazy.
It took me three years of fighting tooth and nail (figuratively) to get my brother on meds he would stay on. And this subtle misdiagnosis is the reason why it took so long.
One big problem I have found is -- EVERYONE WHO GETS TAKEN TO THE PSYCH WARD GETS HALDOL RIGHT AWAY.
Haldol - aka haloperidol - is the cheap old standard of anti-psychotics.
The problem my brother had was: once they shot him up with Haldol, he presented well enough so that they didn't dig any further and they missed his bipolar component and didn't treat it.
This could be your mother's problem too. They may be giving her Haldol and missing a bipolar component because Haldol works so well in the first couple of weeks it can mask other stuff going on.
But Haldol has terrible side effects. My brother went into convulsions for 24 hours once. That's an expected side effect. It's scary stuff, Haldol. The scarininess of Haldol is one reason why people quit taking it even when it works.
How did we break this Haldol cycle? The next time I had to call 911 and have him hauled away, I told the police officer that my brother was allergic to Haldol.
An allergy is something they have to report. So it got reported.
So when my brother got to the hospital, the doctors couldn't just shoot him up with Haldol as usual. They had to observe him carefully and come up with an alternate medication plan.
That was when they finally realized he didn't have schizophrenia, he had schizoaffective disorder, and he got a better medication prescription. An anti-psychotic plus lithium.
And he's stuck to that prescription, because it works, and there's no Haldol in it.
Right now I would have to say that Haldol is as much an obstacle as it is an aid to treating mental illness in this country.
If you want a patient in the psych ward to get the best treatment possible -- tell the doctors the patient is allergic to Haldol.
That's the big life lesson I have to offer here.
