Seeing the Doc

I'm off to see my doc today and I'm feeling nervous. I'm always nervous around docs. I naturally feel inferior and it causes me to panic and I am unable to talk. I often leave without the answers I want because I never speak up or ask questions.

Anyway I don't see this doc very often. The last time I saw them was about 2-3 months ago. My support worker says we can ask him about DID today. I'm really nervous. This doc is part of the psychosis team I'm still with. I saw him about 4 months ago and he decided to change my diagnosis from psychosis to BPD but this seemed like a ludicrous diagnosis for me and pretty much everyone I spoke to agreed. The next time I saw him he took back the BPD diagnosis and said it was a dissociative disorder. That's all he said. He didn't provide me with any more info and he's left me to figure that out by myself. So I'm nervous about seeing him today. I'm worried what he might say when we suggest DID to him. He's so quick to choose different diagnoses I wouldn't be surprised if he retracted everything he has said and sticks me back in the psychosis box again.

Anyway I'm setting off in a hour and I hate the wait. I just keep looking at the clock. I can't distract myself. I feel very unwell when I am nervous and I struggle to find ways of calming myself down.
When I return from the docs I'll let you know how it went.

I'm thinking of you

Is your case worker coming with you? Could you give her a list of what you'd like to know so that she could help keep things on track?

I hope it goes well.

hope things go okay

Thank you very much.

Yes my support worker will be with me which helps a lot. Still feel very nervous though. Just wanna get things over and done with.

That's understandable. Best of luck. Thinking of you

Good luck

Have you comsidered writing your questions down? I do that so we dn't forget
Sometimes people even ak me to go to the doctor ith them and take notes for them

We write down and practice saying anything we want to say or ask, or sometimes we just push L.C. up front since she just states everything anyway because she doesn't care and doesn't get nervous or anything like that. She just walks in and is like, "Here's my life, here's the facts, here's what I experience", and then just spews it all out without blinking an eye, and then waits to hear their reaction.

Anyway, thinking of you. Hope everything goes well! It's natural to be nervous. Just try to breathe and stay calm.


~A mixture of us(?)

Well I'm back. It all went quite well. At first when I arrived my support worker informed me she got the times mixed up and I was meant to be in at 2 and not 3 so I missed my appointment. However I stuck around as I needed to sort out quite a few things with my support worker and it turned out I could then see the psychiatrist at 4.
Everything went pretty well. He asked me the usual questions-how was the medication working, how have my symptoms been,what's my mood like,etc. I felt pretty nervous and normally I don't speak up but I said to him that he told me I had a dissociative disorder and he hadn't provided me with any information and I was a little annoyed because it felt like I was having to figure things out on my own and I didn't want to be going in the wrong direction. He apologized and said he must have forgotten to give me a leaflet about dissociative disorders in our previous meeting.

I kept pushing myself to be more assertive and told him that I had been looking into DID and although I don't like to self diagnose I felt that this fitted well with me and then I explained about the nature of my voices and how they sometimes assume control. He also agreed. He gave me some basic info on DID and said that it's normally seen as an American thing and therefore it's treated quite differently in the UK but he did believe that DID, or at least something that works like DID, does exist and it happens quite a lot. He said that for now DID is my working diagnosis, so it isn't 100% official but that is what we are calling it.

So now I feel pretty calm and relaxed and I suppose it's a step in the right direction. Also the leaflet i've been given should come in useful as now I can show it to my mum and give her an idea of what is going on for me. However the leaflet does pretty much say that its caused by abuse and I think that will upset her greatly but I know that I haven't been abused so, I dunno, maybe I'll just have to explain causes more in detail.

So yeah...Thats how the day went

That sounds like great progress and you did a great job standing up for yourself I'm so glad to hear this!

Congratulations!! This is great!! Such a step forward!! We're all so happy for you!!

Yeah, what we would do is print off some more information about the causes of DID, like how it's by trauma, including extreme stress, and not just abuse, to help your mom understand a bit more. And stress can be anything as "simple" as not being able to get along with other people easily, or being very shy, and such. We've found out (through Rain) that things like Autsim/Asperger's can have an effect in DID development, since they tend to cause more stress in the sense of understanding things/others, expressing yourself, etc., and so it'd make sense that the same thing could apply to kids who are just super shy, or get stressed out over things easily, or have trouble expressing themselves in general, and such. (Wouldn't be the only "cause", but we can see how it'd help the development). So, yeah. Definitely print out some more info and explain a bit more about how DID is caused. Other than that, everything sounds like it's going great!!

We hope things continue to go well for you!!



~A mixture of us(?)