I was seeing a psychiatrist, but I was having trouble keeping up with the paperwork. It wasn't much paperwork, but I needed to fill it incrementally over the course of a month and there would be times where my mood would dip and I just couldn't do it. If you skip out on an entry even once, it invalidates the whole sheet and interrupts the data, so there were a lot of false starts.
Psychiatry is a necessary step in the path to recovery, but it wasn't a level of care that I was equipped for yet. I realised that I needed to take a step back and start from the start - counselling, then psychiatry, then psychology.
There's a tense vibe that happens when what I'm looking for doesn't match up with what the mental healthcare professional is going for. It happened once before, where to try and get me on her track, a counsellor told me that she didn't think she could help me. I was feeling pretty vulnerable at the time and the thought of being given up on made me cry - only for her to go "the fact that you had that reaction means that there's progress you can make", which led to me closing myself off to her.
I could feel that same tension coming from my psychiatrist. And I understand, because if I don't do the paperwork like she asks, I'm fucking around and wasting her time. So to get to a point where I'm not fucking around and wasting her time, I need to downgrade and stay the full course.
wow. I had no idea psychiatrists worked like that.
I also thought the progression was psychologist, then psychiatrist.