How I Am SSRI-less; WITHDRAWAL: Let's Not Do It Again; The 2 Types of Finnish Customer Service

[cimorene]

FUN FACTS! Did you know that anti-depressant prescriptions expire exactly 1 year after they're written? I didn't!

Usually you would never have reason to find this out. "How on Earth, Cim, could this come to happen to you?" you might be saying, especially if you have my experience of the withdrawal symptoms from an SSRI. Well, dear reader, it basically happened like this!

1. From the time I first moved to Finland I was a student, and students get better public healthcare than regular members of the public.



2. In summer 2008 I dropped out of school and had to stop seeing my psychiatrist. He told me that the waiting lists to see a public doctor are quite long. He gave me an extra-long prescription to make sure I didn't run out before I got in to see a doctor.



3. This prescription lasted easily until the following January, when I made an appointment with a GP. I saw her in March 2009, at which point my extra-long prescription had nearly run out.



4. The GP agreed that since I was doing well on my current prescription, but still needed it on a day-to-day basis, she would write another scrip for it without immediately putting me on the psychiatrist-waiting list. She said to go ahead and use up the rest of the old scrip before hers, which she wrote for 6 months.



5. Because I am an airhead and my former -iatrist would write me a new paper scrip whenever he asked if I had plenty left and I said "I'm not sure, I might be almost out", I subsequently discovered three or four paper scrips with one or two fills left on them from him. And since anytime you see a GP it's a game of Russian Psychoactive Drugs Roulette whether they will try to tell you that you "shouldn't continue to need an SSRI indefinitely"... I used all of them up before I filled the GP's scrip for the first time. That was in September 2009.



6. Because I am an airhead with a wacky sleep schedule I frequently go 24-36 hours before I remember to take my psychoactive drugs (usually thanks to the onset of withdrawal, yay!). So I only ran out last Monday.

I had already gone without a little longer than usual when I got Wax to the pharmacy with me (getting 100 pills at once still costs €75 or something and I didn't have that in my account) on Wednesday for my last 6-month refill. So I was unmedicated when I encountered in the person of the pharmacist, whose English sucked by the way, a Rude Angry-Glaring Unhelpful Person. (This is all too common in Finland.) Her method of informing us that we can't has medicine was a) too long, b) delivered partly in angry Finnish over my head to Wax, and c) confusing.

So I've been dealing with a lot more background anxiety over this (and the fact that I now have to sign up for the psychiatrist-waiting list) and also rediscovering the joy of My Brain Without SSRIs: Frequent food cravings! Slightly increased sex drive! The black spiral of "I am worthless" thoughts! Periodic crying jags, tears welling up whenever anyone raises their voice! Yeah, I haven't really missed it.

When I was trying to talk to someone in the public healthcare system about getting my medication back yesterday, I accidentally dialed the health center's switchboard instead of receptionist (mainly due to confusing design of the website, but also my confusion because I've never before encountered a doctor's office where the switchboard was anyone other than the receptionist... or at least not where they had a website, but the number for patients to call was not clearly displayed/labeled), and the switchboard lady didn't speak English or Swedish (whatever, but you actually are legally guaranteed service in Swedish from any branch of the government) and was equally as rude as the pharmacist to Wax, once Wax took the phone from me. However, when I dialed the 24-hour Advice From A Nurse hotline in exasperation because I couldn't figure out how to get my GP's receptionist, the nurse was INCREDIBLY helpful (she made the appointment for me), and also sweet.

This caused me and Wax to reflect on how Finland, being a country utterly without the concept of customer service, basically has 2 kinds of people in customer service:

1. The people who should never, ever be allowed to answer the phone (possibly including their OWN phone) because they treat every conversation as an armed battle in which the other person, by speaking to them, has been the aggressor, and is probably fighting dirty. Everything you say to these people is received with an air of surprisedly outraged hostility, as if you've offended them not just egregiously but so unprecedentedly that they're still having trouble wrapping their brain around it. These people are frequently cashiers and bus drivers, but there are a surprising number of them in the human resources industry.



2. The people who are genuinely nice, so their helpfulness is quite unlike the helpfulness you get from an American who is good at customer service. There's something earnest, never rehearsed about their helpfulness, because it springs not from any kind of training, but from actual niceness. I've talked to plenty of Americans in customer service who WERE genuinely nice (counting among them quite a few nurses and pharmacists), but the Finnish ones have a charming naïvete of approach because they've had to reinvent the Wheel of Polite Assistance.

...that's where my normally-sort-of-daily posts went. Hopefully your regularly scheduled programming will be returning soon.

PS: I'm totally making that shirt that says "Medicine Is the Best Medicine" now. Fuck yes.

Comments

[northern]

Withdrawal sucks - I hope you get your meds back soon.

[cimorene]

Fingers crossed, it should be Monday!

[retrofit]

sounds like a truly frustrating situation - hope you get it sorted soon. Also, the phrase, "reinvent[ing] the Wheel of Polite Assistance" is full of win.

I've spent a good deal of time with two Finnish sisters who visit my part of the States frequently, and who pretty much exemplify your dichotomy of Finnish service there. Fortunately, the one who is on the negative side is actually genuinely nice, too - just her style of public interaction is... gruff at times. Once you get to know her, it's less gruff, but still bracingly (that's meant as a more... intense version of refreshing) unvarnished. Can't quite imagine the whole country at once.

[mecurtin]

being a country utterly without the concept of customer service

But WHY? I wonder in fascination. What's the social history of Finland, that no-one knows this stuff? I mean, didn't there used to be people who were servants? Or were there only slaves (who don't really learn customer service, just resentment)?

[waxjism]

We do pretend to have customer service, we're just naturally really shit at it. The Finnish ~national character is gruff, independent, resentful of The Man, always pining for the fiords Great Outdoors Where A Man Can Breathe. That doesn't really mesh well with being smiley and helpful at random customers. (The customers also don't want to be smiley and nice to sales ppl, they just want to buy shit and get out of there.)

...

We did have servants. They were probably rude too. Had slaves back in the day when Europeans had slave castes, which was whenever... middle ages, etc.