Maybe there’s hope for me…

In today’s New York Times, the lead article in the Sunday Review is titled Where Have All the Neurotics Gone? by health reporter Benedict Carey.

Where are neurotics today?

It seems they’ve become a thing of the past. An old, dying breed. According to Carey,

“For a generation of postwar middle-class Americans, being neurotic meant something more than being merely anxious, and something other than exhibiting the hysteria or other disabling moods problems for which Freud used the term. It meant being interesting (if sometimes exasperating) at a time when psychoanalysis reigned in intellectual circles and Woody Allen reigned in movie houses.

“That it means little now, to most Americans, is evidence of how strongly language drives the perception of mental struggle, both its sources and its remedies. In recent years psychiatrists have developed a more specialized medical vocabulary to describe anxiety, the core component of neurosis, and as a result the public has gained a greater appreciation of its many dimensions.

“But in the process we’ve lost entirely the romance of neurosis, as well as it’s physical embodiment – a restless, grumbling, needy presence that once functioned in the collective mind as an early warning system, an inner voice that hedged against excessive optimism.”

There’s a mysterious, somewhat strange-sounding convention in psychiatry, I think. I’m not sure. I’ve never imagined it would apply to me, so I’ve never bothered to investigate it.

I’ve steered far away from. It scares me.

Leaving therapy…

Here’s how it was explained to me at the Eating Disorders Outpatient program I just completed. And remember, an eating disorder is a psychiatric illness.

For a minimum of two years, I was told, I could not go back to see my social worker, dietician or any of the practitioners who helped me begin eating normally for the first time in my life.

A follow-up might be possible, but now I have a psychologist to help me.

I suspect psychiatrists work in similar ways. I don’t know…

Once you say good bye. Once you receive your psychiatric “seal of approval.” Once you have your psychotherapeutic “walking papers.” Once you leave, is that it?

Do you venture off into the world on your trembling feet, vulnerable, alone? Independent?  Do you never see your therapist again? Or at least for a minimum of two years? That never seemed to be the case with Dr. Bob. It seemed he would always be there for me.

As anyone acquainted with me and this blog knows, I see a psychiatrist regularly for my mood disorder. We started seeing each other in 1991.

He’s an unusual psychiatrist…

Dr. Bob is not a psychoanalyst like my first psychotherapist back in 1960. She was Jungian and probably one of the only therapists to treat children like me in Toronto.

“A very, very, very difficult child,” I’ve been told time and again all my life. “There was something wrong with you.”

You hear that long enough and often enough and you begin to believe it, Dr. Bob reflected this week.

His orientation to psychotherapy is eclectic. We talk. I sit facing him and he sits behind his desk facing me. There’s a couch in his office, but I doubt anyone uses it. And an intriguing piece of art that says, I need you which I’ve written about here.

It’s been a while. And a struggle. But I am definitely on the mend.

Happy 2012. I have resolved not to make any resolutions, other than to be more empathetic with Marty, my husband, who has a completely different temperament than I do.

My mind works faster than my left forefinger, so writing this blog is not easy for me. Living with me is not easy either, but we’re doing much better. Couples therapy is wondrous if you find the right therapist and, happily, we did through my eating disorders program.

Today’s big news? 

My cast comes off today ~ I hope.

In the meantime, to make life easier for Saint Marty, I had all my hair cut off. Every little bit helps. I love it and when both my hands are working, I’ll send you a picture.

Since we last spoke, I was on Day 31 of my Eating Disorder Treatment Program.

In February, my family doctor began cautioning me about my obsessive dieting.

She explained that eating disorders are psychiatric conditions, mental illnesses. She used the “A” word. Anorexia.

I thought she was out of her mind…

I am not thin. I’ve never been thin. Certainly never too thin. I feel I need to lose more weight. To get thinner.

She began monitoring me, monthly. By May, overly concerned about my inability to perceive myself realistically and my relentless determination to lose weight, she said this was related to my “mania” ~ my bipolar disorder.

She sent a note to my psychiatrist.

He referred me to an Eating Disorders Clinic…

Last month, my kidney transplant specialist expressed similar concerns. He didn’t want my electrolytes to go out of whack. When I diet, my sodium levels plummet.

When these three doctors, the team that keeps me alive, showed such alarm, I decided to investigate eating disorders myself.