Friday, February 15, 2008

Crazy (a book), and update on my mental health

I'm reading a book called Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness. It has a lot of information about how people with mental illnesses are treated in jails, and in hospitals, as well. It's very critical of how people with mental illnesses are not given adequate care sometimes for various reasons. I like the book, but I disagree that the civil rights laws which now protect the human rights of people with mental illnesses are not fair or safe or good, just because they prevent people from being locked inside hospitals when they are not a threat to themselves or someone else. I don't think it is wise to suggest that everybody who is psychotic should be locked inside a hospital and/or forced to take medication when they don't want to. At the same time, I can understand that it must have been difficult for this author's son to be psychotic and not be treated, because I lived that way myself for years, and I would not want to have to live that way again.

While, I don't necessarily agree with all of it, I do recommend the book because it makes some excellent points about how we need better treatment, how insurance companies need to pay more for treatment of mental illness and how people are unfairly locked inside jails when they belong in hospitals instead.

In other news...I've been noticing myself having little symptoms of delusional thinking lately, which I don't like. I don't understand how on earth this could possibly happen when I am currently taking three antipsychotic medications. It is not like I'm severely psychotic or anything, but I've noticed little things, like, thinking that something I read in a book is a special message put there just for me, but knowing this is not the case, because I can recognize these old symptoms when they come back quickly. I just want to keep track of it here, because this way I can go back and remind myself what worked and did not work as far as medication goes. My mood is fine, and I think my medications are working fine, but there is just this little bit of a problem slipping in, which might be indicative of a lack of proper sleep and a lot of stress related to not having a job right now.

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