All the Psychiatrists I've Loved: 2004-2024

This year marks the twentieth year that I've been seeking professional psychiatric help. From pill-pushers to naturopaths, they've all tried to help me in their own ways.

My first was Dr. Peter, a Greek psychiatrist with a sunny, two-windowed office that looked over Boynton Beach Boulevard. He was next door to a therapist, which turned out to be convenient. My parents and I would refer to them as “my team” throughout the high school years.

You never forget your first.

He spoke to me like an adult, even though I was sixteen. For part of the appointment, my mom was excused, and he would look straight at me. He had kind blue eyes and bushy brows and curly gray hair. I thought he looked a bit like a nice teddy bear.

He was very nice, clearly experienced in the realm of insane Florida teenagers. He wasn’t like the therapist who had slammed down a DSM-IV-TR at me and yelled at me to read aloud the “addict” part when she found out I was smoking weed, then had my parents crash the next appointment while we read a pamphlet for a wilderness camp. (If you’d like to know more about wilderness camps in the early aughts, see here, here and here). Thank you, Mom and Dad, for never sending me there.

He was also, unfortunately for me, aware of my alcoholic family history and cared about it. Back then, I don’t remember anyone asking about a family history of anxiety or mood disorders. He might of, I just don’t remember.

What I do remember is that he zeroed in on the history of addiction in my family and removed “the good stuff” from my repertoire. No benzos for me, at least at first.

However, he did give me Adderall, since I was crashing cars without it. He also gave me an SSRI.

It takes a few weeks before you feel any effect, he told me.

I was horrified. What kind of drug was this?

So I had my Adderall in the morning, my Adderall in the evening, and my SSRI. That’s a lot of stimulants for a sixteen-year-old with anxiety and a blossoming drug problem, but hey, it was 2004.

The other things I remember about Peter:

• giving me a Klonopin wafer that melted under my tongue when I had a full-fledged meltdown in his office, screaming my head off. He took away my car keys, handed me the Klonopin, and we sat together until I calmed down.

• The therapist next door was also a nice, gray-haired man who let me sit down and waste my parents’ money while we talked about absolutely nothing.

• Eventually he gave me regular Klonopin. I was victorious.

The only feelings I have about Peter, looking back, is gratitude. Thank God he didn’t prescribe those benzos off the bat or too much - many of my other anxiety-ridden Millennials weren’t so lucky. He didn’t underreact or overreact to my meltdowns or my drug use (mostly weed and alcohol at the time). He did eventually give me a benzo for a limited time, a summer where I was especially nutty, but at that point my symptoms warranted it, whether it was me faking it to get them or all real. By the time I was having them, I couldn’t tell: I wanted the benzos but I also just completely melted down.

We like Dr. Peter.

Things I didn’t tell Dr. Peter:

• I liked to crush the orange Adderall balls, whose dust could be found on my debit card

• It is very hard to only take one Klonopin

• I also helped myself to my parents, my friends’ parents, and anyone else’s in-home pharmacy to supplement Peter’s regimen

• The actual amount of illegal drugs I was taking, which tends to make your prescribed drugs not work that well

Then came college, with its shiny new Student Health Center. It was fall of 2007. This was where my new man was. Dr. C. I can see him now: he was tall, good-looking, and easy-going, probably in his early thirties. He looked like a sandy-haired Brendan Fraser (The Mummy, not The Whale).

On our first encounter, he refilled my Adderall and SSRI, mentioning that alcohol doesn’t interact well with them and yada yada yada warnings yada yada.

I smiled dutifully, happily accepting my new scripts.

Before I left, I said, Oh, one more thing - I have a flight home soon and I’m very afraid of flying.

He gave me five pills. I forget what they were. I wasn’t thrilled about the amount but was happy I received any at all.

I liked Dr. C. I also liked the freedom of having a medical provider that didn’t know my parents, who were hands-off but could be called upon to crash a session at any moment (a fact I’d learned the hard way twice in Florida).

The next thing I remember about Dr. C is sitting in his office during the worst month of my life (up to that point). I was fuming. It was taking all I had not to throw something.

Looking back, Dr. C was also a very good psychiatrist, because he was yanking me off all my medications. And I was pissed. I was so pissed my eyes were darting around the room for projectiles.

In perhaps the first example in history of a bureaucratic organization having good communication between departments, Dr. C had found out about my incident (more about that later). I don’t know if it was the police, the student disciplinary committee, the housing board, or ambulatory services that told him. But he sure as hell was not prescribing me anything but…

Cymbalta?!?! I screamed, then trying not to look too pissed or insane, since that would seal my fate of only being on one stupid SSRI. Oh well, I was a goner.

Yes, and it reacts terribly to alcohol, Dr. C glowered. I remember him seeming a little ticked off at me. At the time, I thought it was because I was being difficult. Today, I assume it’s because perhaps he could have been associated with my incident, if any of his prescriptions were a cause of it. (They weren’t).

How will I even know it’s working? I demanded.

When you stop punching walls, he said. I could fill a coffee table book with mental health professionals’ comebacks. Maybe I should write that one instead.

The next month, I confirmed I’d stopped punching walls. I also confirmed I was seeing the CBT therapist the university was forcing me to see, who was the first mental health professional I ever trusted and couldn’t manipulate (after all, Peter did give me those benzos) and was clean as well as attending twelve-step meetings.

Dr. C. was impressed. I became a model psychiatric patient. I was stable. Turns out, when not on drugs, I am really good at following directions.

Soon I was sane and responsible enough that Dr. C. would even give me Vyvanse for my ADHD, which I took as prescribed.

We like Dr. C.

Things I didn’t tell Dr. C:

• The long list of drugs I was taking with his prescribed medications

• I hated his guts for at least three months

Then came college graduation, and I was also kicked to the curb by my student health insurance (f you Aetna and US health insurance) because my parents were old enough to be on Medicare.

This was terrifying. I was twenty-three. I had been mentally well for two years.

This was when we (we being me, my parents, my sponsor, and my new provider) discovered my terror of losing my pyschiatrist.

Without health insurance, I couldn’t afford to see a psychiatrist. I was an English-Anthropology major who had graduated in the midst of a financial crisis. I could only get a part-time job bartending in the French Quarter, at a dead bar where I was lucky to make sixty dollars a night, even with some creative counting practices at the tipjar.

I remember endless calls to insurance companies and psychiatrists offices. I remember crying in the booth of the bar I worked at, heart pounding, having a breakdown over trying to figure it out.

Then fate, God, luck intervened: I found out about a musicians’ clinic that offered low-cost appointments to “tradition-bearers”, which I qualified for because I was writing for a local culture magazine.

There, I sat waiting to see someone, feeling like a fraud. There were legitimately disenfranchised people here. I didn’t see how I, a white kid that had gone to a private university, fit in. Now, at thirty-five, I know I absolutely belonged there: I had a few dollars to my name, no support from our healthcare insurance system, and no way to get health insurance I could afford. And I really was writing about culture!

That’s been a theme in all of my appointments with psychiatrists: the dichotomy of feeling absolutely nuts and unhinged at my low points but also thinking I am much better off than others, especially those in the waiting room. This is a big commonality among anxiety-sufferers: our disorder can make us high-functioning or at least see ourselves as more high-functioning than others.

But when the medicine doesn’t work, my baseline is always in fight or flight mode. My brain thinks I’m under gunfire when it’s a Slack asking about a deadline. I have shortness of breath during bathtime because the baby could slip, despite the baby being safe with me and in his bath lounger. My teeth get wiggly because I gnash them so hard. I crave sugar at night and I pound caffeine in the morning. I am mean and cruel to the people I love the most. Finally, I fall apart.

Anyway, that psychiatrist wasn’t really a psychiatrist. I remember very little about her. She was a social worker who was able to fill my SSRI and Vyvanse and prevent me from losing my mind. I continued to be stable, and feel guilty sitting in the waiting room, for a few more years.

Things I didn’t tell the social worker:

• I’d gotten a new job

I was no longer a tradition bearer. Now I was actually a fraud when I went there and the guilt was killing me. I scrambled. My new job’s health insurance didn’t cover mental health, so that was no help to me.

I found the cheapest psychiatrist I could, a man so old he had no computer or electronics in his office. I’m certain he’s dead now, because he had to be in his nineties when I saw him. He wore a wool three piece suit in the summer. His office was piled high with books, and when we discussed my medication, he wobbled around searching for his outdated book of prescription medications. I may have even offered to Google (I hope I didn’t). Patience for other people was never a strong suit (again, anxiety). I quickly figured out he would give me any medication I asked for, but didn’t take advantage of it due to the moral compass I’d acquired in sobriety.

He wrote me a script for the SSRI. By this time, I’d had to switch from an SNRI to an SSRI because the SSRI had generics, which were much more affordable. They worked well enough - I had occasional panic attacks, the odd overreaction here and there, but overall my anxiety and my life was under control.

Things I didn’t tell him:

• A lot, because he couldn’t hear me

Still, we like the old man.

Then the scripts ran out, I got a new job, and I decided to run an experiment: let’s see what it’s like going off my medication. I was twenty-five, in my first “big girl” job at an agency, four years sober, and in a new and so far successful relationship. Oh, and my dad had cancer.

This was a great time to conduct an experiment.

After a year of panic attacks every Sunday night, tears every day, crushing shortness of breath, and short Slack messages that left my colleagues wondering if I was furious at them.

The experiment was over. After somehow going back on the SSRI and getting refills for a year or two (I do not recall how), I found the second-to-last psychiatrist (hopefully) in this pill-fueled line-up.

Dr. D. was the psychiatrist that several of my sober girlfriends went to. He also went to the same high school as my therapist and Dr. C, the Student Health Center psychiatrist.

It was around 2018, maybe 2019. I had been sober for almost ten years at this point and had rarely had to recount my mental health journey with anyone — the old man was in the distant past thanks to endless refills, and the social worker was probably in about 2012.

This was a good psychiatrist. He sat me down, made eye contact, and had me recount everything, from top to bottom. It took an hour. And the horrible things — the things that were so covered and mutilated and twisted — all of them had to do with my anxiety. This was a psychiatrist I couldn’t bullshit, either, although I had no desire to try.

I sat in my car after and sobbed.

We increased my SSRI dosage, since it hadn’t been working as well, and played around with Wellbutrin (gave me shortness of breath, super fun).

Things I didn’t tell Dr. D.:

• I was honest with this one, he felt like a human lie detector

We like Dr. D.

I saw him for a few years, then left him when I moved across the country in 2021.

I found myself manless, but it was okay. I was stable and Telehealth allowed me to get my refills from nurse practioners.

Then the wheels started to come off.

Finally, I started having my nervous breakdown, or whatever you want to call this period of my life that we’re in now.

I have two kids, a job, a husband, and a lot to lose.

And so we have come to my newest man, who is a woman, and who I will let do absolutely anything to me to help manage my anxiety.

She’s my age. I think we could hang out, which is something crazy people like me probably often think about their mental health professionals, and we won’t ever hang out. She certainly thinks I have severe anxiety and —

Do you like animals? she asked me this morning.

We were reviewing the results of my “brain map”, a suspicious but somewhat reputable practice where she’d thrown a skull cap full of electrodes on my head and measured my brain waves for forty-five minutes.

Imagine being in the middle of a nervous breakdown, being so anxious and ADHD you can’t even work, and someone telling you can’t tense up or move for forty-five minutes. Tense up and jitter is all you do. Oh, and focus, but don’t meditate. That’s the only way you know how to calm your mind? Well, try not to do it.

Animals? I said, confused. I mean, yeah, I like animals.

Your MU wave is really high, she said. Usually this happens in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder or ADHD. They tend to want to be vets or engineers.

I almost laugh. This is absurd. I’m the Head of Client Services at a tech company, I’ve managed people, I give presentations, I do people—

Then I remember. My first screenname was doggirl10@hotmail.com.

And right now, in my time of troubles, I am terrified of getting on a call with a customer or a coworker.

She’s taught me a lot of things already, my new man. She’s taught me that nutrition is important when considering anxiety, which rings true along with my unhealthy relationship with sugar. The brain map sounds woo woo but tracks. Based on my map, SNRIs will work better for me than SSRIs. It also doesn’t look like ADHD, but what it does look like is that I have a lot of overwhelm and anxiety, which presents like ADHD. I am so anxious and overwhelmed I forget everything, and sometimes I need to shut down and take a nap, but I am not depressed.

She also prescribed me supplements and I took blood tests to see my minerals and vitamins and hormones and whatever.

She also prescribed me a homeopathic medicine, which I told her I was dubious of but I was willing to take if she thought it might work. Arsenicum Album.

To help me stop thinking about my children dying in a fire.

Damn you, fire safety camp.

But she’s teaching me a lot. To look at the whole self, not just my anxiety contained in its neat little box, away from everything else where I try to shut it down or drown it out. She’s teaching me that my anxiety affects everything and everything affects my anxiety. Like addiction, it’s something that I learn to live with and manage, rather than just shut down and snuff out. There will be no perfect pill to make it better, although I’m sure hoping that we can find some that make my life a lot more manageable.

Today, I can look back at my sixteen-year-old self having a tantrum in Dr. Peter’s sunny office, and compare it to my sobbing during my first visit to Dr. N when my beautiful life feels like it is so, so threatened by this disorder. I am not in a tantrum, demanding Klonopin to feel better. Nor am I attempting to bully the college psychiatrist into handing over Adderrall.

Instead, I am willing to do anything to keep my beautiful life, and trusting that this is the right person to help me do that.

So here’s to my new man—my newest woman—and to the next chapter of this journey.

We like her.