Quote:
Originally posted by Gangrell:
quote:
Originally posted by Aelia Jusa:
Having a trained professional who can help you develop coping strategies, as well as provide unconditional support and empathy cannot be anything other than beneficial.
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Aelia, from your recent posts, you're saying that only doctors can make certain of this and will undoubtably help others. But just because people have a doctorate or degree in medicine does not make them a guaranteed help. Case and point, me.
About a month and a half ago, I went to see my psychiatrist to start taking medication, so she offered a particular one to me. Tegritol I believe it's spelt, is a very dangerous medication. She went into the explanation of it, sugar coated it, and said, "A bad reaction to it is a rash anywhere on your body, if that happens, stop taking it." Sounds reasonable right? Nope.
Tegritol is a medication to fight depression, that's true, but it's also dangerous as hell to be messing with. You get a rash on one place on your body, your palms, that's because it has an allergic reaction to your blood. If you abruptly stop taking it, it will kill you and it has proved more often than not to be fatal. It doesn't matter if you've spent one year or twenty in your field of expertise, that doesn't always make that person right by any means. [/QUOTE]Absolutely true. However, people who have degrees and doctorates weren't just handed them. I would say it was fairly logical that someone who has been trained by experienced professionals and had experience themselves would be in a better position to perform their job than someone with no training or experience whatsoever. Being informed as a patient is critically important. Obviously you were able to make an informed decision about whether to take the medication, and I would agree that your psychiatrist should have been more frank with you about the drug - it seems to me that she was pretty negligent in how she explained the side-effects. But people in this thread are essentially warning people off professionals, especially psychologists, because of a few bad experiences, and as I commented in my last post, they wouldn't do this with other professions. This is my industry - I know there are bad clinicians out there. But that doesn't make a layman any better at practicing psychology than a psychologist.
By the way, that wouldn't have happened with a psychologist. They can't prescribe medication. And no one ever got a rash from CBT
