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a long run of psychology
23 Feb 2020 02:49 pmI saw my regular psychologist Friday for what should be the second-to-last time.
Essentially, my medications work pretty well and my coping methods are good, and I'm legally and scientifically speaking no longer depressed, according to Beck's Depression Inventory - and this has been the case for... several years now actually. Even through my near-nervous breakdown over the past six months, my reactions to stress have been reasonable and I have handled it all well, in his assessment. So technically I haven't needed mental healthcare, per se, apart from supervision of my medication and management in case of having another episode; but because my major malfunctions (avoidance, executive dysfunction, anxiety in social situations) combined with my circumstances make it especially hard to get a job, and because I needed certification of my mental healthcare client status for applications, and because his client lists are basically at his own discretion due to his exact job description, my psychologist has kept me on the rolls and continued checking in on me once a month or so, and gone about 500% above and beyond the job description to help me find someone in the unemployment bureau or social services who could actually talk with me for more than fifteen minutes in a personal manner and give appropriate advice, basically, and he's been trying for YEARS now to find someone like that ( Read more... )
But moving to Pargas in June led me to transfer to the Pargas branch of the Employment Bureau, but because Pargas has only 18 000 people to Turku's 190 000, Pargas doesn't have a branch but only a single worker, and I guess because they have so little else that they have to do here, the city social worker in charge of employment/etc was also present at our meeting, where both of them helped me in a friendly and competent manner for about two hours and covered helping me finish the application to the abovementioned career counseling course as well as spending a fair amount of time figuring out how I could fit a work practice in the meantime if the wait for the course is until the summer (they texted me the next day after checking with the course secretary to say that it is). I am pretty much covered now, because I can count on these ladies for further help in a similarly in-depth and solicitous manner if the course doesn't pan out; and since I am both mentally healthy and now a resident of a different city from his practice, my psychologist suggested we have one last meeting in about a month's time. I'm okay with that, actually; I think he's right about the two women who helped me and I think it would also be easy to get help from other people, and I don't think I really need a psychologist's services right now. If I did need to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist again, it would probably be much easier to see one in Pargas than in Turku - Pargas seems to have much less in the way of waiting times and so on, understandably for a town with a single main street.
Looking back over this quest, and hunting down links to the old journal entries about it, has really impressed upon me again just how much he's helped me over the last... is it 11? no... nine years, almost exactly. I'm lucky it was him that now-retired psychiatrist sent me to in 2011.
Essentially, my medications work pretty well and my coping methods are good, and I'm legally and scientifically speaking no longer depressed, according to Beck's Depression Inventory - and this has been the case for... several years now actually. Even through my near-nervous breakdown over the past six months, my reactions to stress have been reasonable and I have handled it all well, in his assessment. So technically I haven't needed mental healthcare, per se, apart from supervision of my medication and management in case of having another episode; but because my major malfunctions (avoidance, executive dysfunction, anxiety in social situations) combined with my circumstances make it especially hard to get a job, and because I needed certification of my mental healthcare client status for applications, and because his client lists are basically at his own discretion due to his exact job description, my psychologist has kept me on the rolls and continued checking in on me once a month or so, and gone about 500% above and beyond the job description to help me find someone in the unemployment bureau or social services who could actually talk with me for more than fifteen minutes in a personal manner and give appropriate advice, basically, and he's been trying for YEARS now to find someone like that ( Read more... )
But moving to Pargas in June led me to transfer to the Pargas branch of the Employment Bureau, but because Pargas has only 18 000 people to Turku's 190 000, Pargas doesn't have a branch but only a single worker, and I guess because they have so little else that they have to do here, the city social worker in charge of employment/etc was also present at our meeting, where both of them helped me in a friendly and competent manner for about two hours and covered helping me finish the application to the abovementioned career counseling course as well as spending a fair amount of time figuring out how I could fit a work practice in the meantime if the wait for the course is until the summer (they texted me the next day after checking with the course secretary to say that it is). I am pretty much covered now, because I can count on these ladies for further help in a similarly in-depth and solicitous manner if the course doesn't pan out; and since I am both mentally healthy and now a resident of a different city from his practice, my psychologist suggested we have one last meeting in about a month's time. I'm okay with that, actually; I think he's right about the two women who helped me and I think it would also be easy to get help from other people, and I don't think I really need a psychologist's services right now. If I did need to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist again, it would probably be much easier to see one in Pargas than in Turku - Pargas seems to have much less in the way of waiting times and so on, understandably for a town with a single main street.
Looking back over this quest, and hunting down links to the old journal entries about it, has really impressed upon me again just how much he's helped me over the last... is it 11? no... nine years, almost exactly. I'm lucky it was him that now-retired psychiatrist sent me to in 2011.
