Urgent advice needed

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One of my best friends - L has gone through some messed up ■■■■ (please forgive me for that @BarbieBF- I’m talking about stuff bad enough to merit a whole ton more swearing beyond that. It just needs that emphasis).

Now she is hearing voices. I talked to her and she is going to a pdoc but because she and her family do understand that this is serious. However the hospital that sent her to the psy hospital that she went to (she has been having migraines amongst other problems and went to a regular hospital for that but I will get into that below). It was a horrible place and I really want to make sure that she doesn’t give up on doctors, meds, therapy, ect. before she has seen how much it can help. There is a depression aspect to this too, but I am going to focus on the sz stuff because I am more scared of that.

The stuff she has gone through before this has generally been at the hands of other people. I am talking about this because if it is sz, paranoia might occur or it might turn out to be an abusive doctor and her parents might think (in other words the doctor might convince them) that it is just paranoid delusions. She has been through that before and I am not letting it happen again. I didn’t know her when this other stuff happened, but I’ll be damned if it happens again.

She just had her gallbladder out (so major surgery this year), she is now having migraines, vomiting blood, ect. so she was taken to a hospital that sent to a bad psych hospital because of the voices she was hearing (I think she said something about seeing things too but we didn’t get as much into that). She just got out after her parents had to fight her out of there because the hospital refused to let her go (and not in a because she was getting help there way). In other words the mental health care industry has not proven itself to be in any way beneficial to her so if she has a bad experience with a doctor who won’t listen, keeps her on meds that aren’t working and haven’t worked for weeks, ect. I don’t know if she will try another one. She is back with her parents (they live in a city but I am skeptical about most doctors in this region of the country).

I am going to call my pdoc Monday (he doesn’t work on Friday) and get recommendations. But I don’t know what her family can afford. I am going to try to get a variety of recommendations at different price ranges.

Here is the part I NEED help with! Many of you either have been through this before or have had your loved ones go through this before. I need to know the tips and tricks to weeding out bad doctors from good doctors. I don’t think that my dr will steer me wrong, but he will have only known them professionally or by word of mouth from other doctors. I do not want to take ANY chances here. I do believe that the sooner someone gets treated the better outcome there is. Even if that isn’t true I don’t want to risk it. Collectively everyone on this site has gone through this doctor selection process a thousand times. I need to know what hints bad doctors gave off, maybe not right away but in time, that either they didn’t know what they hell they were talking about or just didn’t really care. Same for the hints given off by good doctors. I need the family/caregiver help with this a ton too. I doubt anyone can really tell a good doc from a bad doc initially while sz is really acting up (I don’t know what state she will be in when she gets there). I need to know what YOU noticed about bad docs and good docs that seem to be a running trend to you.

IMPORTANT: Because of all of her other health problems I am trying to steer her towards a doctor who will be more likely to be able to figure out/work with her other doctors to figure out if these things are being brought on by a physical ailment (as opposed to a mental health problem. I know that mental illness is physical too. I just couldn’t think of any other way to put it, I’m sorry) that is messing with her brain/brain chemistry/whatever in the hell causes this stuff or if it is a mental illness. I want to make sure that she isn’t taking these meds forever because her spleen was putting off chemicals that were affecting her brain that started to make her hear things. I have no idea how the body works. I’m not even really sure to any degree what the spleen does. I don’t really care right now though. She is about my age- early twenties- in other words in the danger time frame.

I was thinking that maybe if she could be seen by a pdoc who worked in or with a particular hospital (not ER, an on hospital campus clinic or something) so that she could go see the other doctors there for the other problems and everyone would be right there if something happened. I don’t know if medical universities have practicing doctors there or if that is even a good idea.

PART TWO: I want to talk to her about going into therapy. I need good weeding out techniques for therapists too. Because of everything she has been through she will need someone really good. My therapist B has really helped me but I want someone who has more experience with abuse survivors and sz for her. I don’t think that someone like B would really be able to help her much, even if it is just to get her all lined out to where she can see a (I hate to say this) less qualified therapist later when she gets more stable and can come back to school (she lives far enough away that she probably wouldn’t be able to see that therapist when she gets back here, but if she does find someone good I will see how feasible a skype sort of session would be). I think that, especially if she is not particularly responsive to meds, a good therapist would help keep her on track.

So here is a summary I need from diagnosed people and family/caregivers:

What have you noticed to be a running theme with the good doctors or therapists you visited? Do they have a PhD? Are they younger? (Under 60) or older? (over 60). Anything you can think of.

What have you noticed to be a running theme with bad doctors or therapists? Same stuff as good doctors and therapists- were they older or younger, phd or none, anything. I don’t care if someone in the comment mentioned that they had a really bad doctor who had such and such book or books always sitting on his desk and you had a bad doctor who had the same book or books on his desk. I need that too! There may be some trend among horrible doctors where they all read the same stuff. This one is far more important. I don’t think that anyone can recognize good docs instinctively, but I am hoping there is some way to avoid at least some bad docs.

What sort of steps did good docs take when first meeting you? Mine did a two hour initial session to try to understand me as well as he could as quickly as he could. He wrote me new scripts for completely different meds right away. However the meds dr J was keeping me on were pretty much ineffective so I don’t think he really had much of a choice and I had had a lot of diagnostic work done before I came back from boarding school so he was able to review that all pointed to sz and I think that sped up the process.

Continuation of above- how soon did you get your first script when you went to see your first pdoc? This is for people who went in with symptoms and a condition like hers (not the physical problems or the bad past but the already hearing voices and depression enough to land you in a psy hospital right away).

Please help! I’ve been as a patient myself but I have never taken anyone to see someone! I won’t be there, but I don’t know if any of her family has had any experience with this what so ever.
@SurprisedJ and @kidsister you are both so close and you have seen both sides of this and both of you and your whole family have worked on this really hard for a really long time. You’ve both talked about how your family does a crisis team thing and how they make out a plan of action. Are there any things that I can tell her to do from the get go that will help? Is it a good idea to get her parents to get her medical power of attorney in case she gets bad or until all of this is sorted out?

And @BarbieBF could you please post all of those wonderful links you have? I’m going to email them to her so that she can share them with her family. I’m going to wait to do it till things start to get hammered out or she starts to get worse. I am going to go back to this topic if she gets worse or if it seems like her parents need them (the all caps title will hopefully grab my eye so that I can find this thread).

Thank you all so much!

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I’m in no position to give advice but thought I’d share how I met my first private psychitrist. He was referred to me by word of mouth from the Christian brother and sister. And I’d need to make appointment in advance, it was full of crowd, the psychiatrist is older than my Dad and is now retired.

Please be patience for others’ sound advice.

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I’m sorry that your friend L is going through this. I know that you want to help and to protect her which is understandable. I’m guessing that she doesn’t have an official diagnoses of schizophrenia. I wasn’t aware until recently that major surgeries can cause PTSD and/or psychosis like symptoms so it’s possible that the combination of her surgery and current physical state and depression are contributing to her symptoms (voices) and that it isn’t sz. On the other hand if is it sz then her previous experiences may be part of it. It’s hard to not let emotions guide you especially when it’s emotions or love for the person that has you involved. Try to find a balance. Remember that other conditions can cause voices not just sz so unless she has other symptoms and had them previous to the surgery then what she is currently experiencing may pass once she is physically well again.

I have only had experience with 3 pdocs. Now I look for things like listening skills. Someone who will listen not just talk at the person. I think reflective listening is important. Asking the person to explain or elaborate on what they are saying if they can. Someone who will take longer then 10 minutes. I appreciate Dr’s who take the time to explain what they are doing and why.

Perhaps therapy can wait a bit until she is physically stable and recovering from the migraines, vomiting etc. I don’t have any experience with therapists.

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@onceapoet first your poor friend needs to get the coughing up blood thing taken care of. I bet that is very traumatic. My poor sis had that happen when her ulcer became really bad.

As far as doctors… you can research them. I don’t know if there are yelp reviews of docs but if there is a doc, there’s got to be a review somewhere.

one thing that helped me is signing all the HIPAA paperwork so that my Doc could talk to my family, my therapist could talk to my family, my therapist could talk to my doc. That way if I was in a bad place, my family could know what was going on and get me out of there sooner.

I wasn’t in my right mind to make some of those decisions in the past and having my parents get the info they needed did help me in the long run.

There are a lot of ideas on the web now for getting a crisis team together. But the poor friend sounds very traumatized. you might want to find a doctor who will let a family member sit in.

It’s hard if your friend doesn’t have an official diagnosis. Then she will get tossed to the ER with no real specialization. I was thinking of visiting nurses and Care teams too. But without an official diagnosis that might not be open to her.

But you never know and you might need to give the family some list of resources like

www.nami.org – This place lists support groups in every area… where there are support groups, there is information on resources in the area. I’m not saying to join the support group… though that will help educate the family… but who ever facilitates the group might know what is available in your area.

I’m so sorry this person has been suffering and has had traumatic experience with the mental health profession ON TOP of everything else that is going on.

I’ll keep posting more as other ideas come to mind.

Good luck and it’s very kind of you to help this person.

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There is a lot going on there! Hope you are taking care of yourself too!
i agree that she needs to get the vomiting, etc…taken care of first. Sounds like she needs a specialist. I can only think to start with her regular doctor, who can refer her to someone who can get her physically well. Usually a doctor can refer to one that they know well.
It should mandatory that someone go with her to advocate-who knows the story so to speak.
This sounds messy, but I know it can be sorted out. Start with the first thing which would be to take care of her physical ailments–someone needs to tell this doctor the whole story. Then-go from there.
i hope you can go with her family-you know a great deal about this person. i hope this helps some.
Here`s a super O hug to you!

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Thank you all so much! I do understand that the vomiting blood ect. should be taken care of first but I have little to no understanding of medicine or any type of physical ailment so I definitely am not going to jump in there with things I read off the internet. I want to make sure she gets the best care she can psychologically because that is the only thing I have any idea or experience with. Please keep any and all advice coming. I know that she might not go through things the way I went through them and others advice can really help me to understand how to react.

I do know that voices and other sz symptoms can be caused by a lot of other things. I just panicked (I honestly I know I will again when I call her next to check up on her) because, while I have never had any experience with voices, they really scared her and that really upset me. I have heard a lot on here how horrible they are and she didn’t say what they were saying. I don’t think that her family has ever had any experience with mental illness before. My Mom’s Aunts were sz and that helped her realize how serious it was. She had to fight my Dad to get me my meds and doctor.

Thank you to everyone who commented (basically) that I need to calm down a little. She is one of my best friends and I know how devastating sz and depression can be even when they are alone. She was living in the same dorm as I was until she went back to her home town to get the full time heavy duty medical help that she needs. I was ok when she was just physically ill because I know nothing about it and I know that these doctors have been doing this their whole lives so they know what the best thing they can do is and I am able to accept that because I have to. It’s also that so many messed up things have happened to her already I feel even more scared that this will happen.

But she she started getting the depression and hearing voices I have been through that so I have some knowledge to work with and I know how people and their families often don’t understand how dangerous these things can be. So I kinda went into overdrive because I feel like that is the only way I can help her.

She isn’t physically with me like she was when she was still in the dorm. When she was here I took her my brita pitcher, about half of my light jackets so that she wouldn’t get cold, and what had been my comfort book for years (The Good Earth- the way Pearl Buck forms words into sentences calms me and comforts me. I don’t know why but it does.) I knew she wouldn’t get the same thing from the book but I brought it anyways. I have always been horrible with verbal reassurance and comfort (to the point of making things worse) so I stayed away from that.

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It’s good of you to keep an eye on early symptoms. If you’re aware of them now… you will be able to tell if they are getting worst or fading away.

Even getting her some help and a good therapist to talk to about any sort of trauma is a good idea. Getting things off her chest before they become big things and start affecting her physical health again.

My sis went through such a high stress time she ended up with a bleeding stomach ulcer and had to go get surgery. When she is under high stress she will hear voices too. She tries to deny it, but I can tell.

I think your doing a great job keeping an eye on your friend and it will let her know that she has someone to be open with and get some resources from if she does get worse.

Sometimes knowing where to turn for help is the hardest thing to figure out when things are going haywire.

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