Private psychiatric assessment results in script for anti-psychotic medication.

[thetruth]

This is a psychiatrists report, which he produced following an assessment in which he said from the start that CPTSD is something that is experienced by people who have had traumatic childhoods. Towards the end, when still attempting to tell him how my symptoms are those of CPTSD, he repeated this statement. H e was saying that my assertion that I have CPTSD cannot be considered based on his statement.

I went there to describe the causes of my current long running condition caused by harrassment, lying and betrayal. The psychiatrist did his level best to avoid this material and he sought out and discussed more historic material so that he could use that to focus on rather than the actual causes of the difficulty I amn having.

He needs to do this to help him avoid the reality that was, my GP refused to say my stress was caused at work, a decision that paved the way for an unfair selection for redundancy which he knew was coming because I told him it was going to happen (in fact, he already knew it was coming before I told him as my employer and him discussed me with my permission but I gave that permission so that my GP could defend me, something he chose not to do). The psychiatrist doesnt wasnt to look at these facts due to the inconvenience of having to say they have had a detrimental impact on my psychological health. The psychiatrist misrepresented the truth to avoid its inconvenient nature.

I had to pay 250  quid to not be listened to and to be misrepresented yet again. This man is saying anything he can think of to blame the problem on my mind rather than what was done to me.

Here it is in all its disgusting ineptitude:-

"Overall Impression

42-year-old man with a history in keeping with recurrent depressive disorder with a
differential of Bi-Polar Type 2, given the expansive periods described on self-report.
PATIENT has no dependents and has not worked since being made redundant in 2013. From
this time he is preoccupied with how he was treated in this position, this does not appear to
be to a delusional intensity but he ruminates on this++. Appears to be obsessional thought
content.

Predisposing Factors

Pressure from Mother at school
Perceived treatment within the workplace

Precipitating factors
Returning home from holiday

Perpetuating factors
Felling of injustice
Differential Diagnosis
Recurrent depressive disorder.
Over the last two years, PATIENT has presented with panic disorder and an obsessional sate.
He feels his mood deteriorated in January/February this year in keeping with a moderate
depressive disorder with increase in obsessional ideas.
PATIENT denied any ill feeling toward the boss and his line manager within the boatmanufacturing
factory or his GP. He did describe the use of word "vengeance". He describes
always having this feeling but no wish, plan or intent to harm others. He feels that this is a
normal feeling within the context of complex PTSD

Plan
We agreed the following care and treatment plan
 Continue with input from within the community mental health team.
 PATIENT was agreeable for information to be passed to this team to aid ongoing input.
 I feel PATIENT would benefit from a further trial of a SSRI +/- low dose of anti-psychotic
drug.
 He would also benefit from CBT.
 It would important for his community health team CPN to explore ongoing thought
content above.
 We will forward PATIENT an abridged outcome of this assessment and associated plan.
Many thanks."

I am not Bipolar. 10 years ago after having had a 2nd experience of hypomania on the back of prolonged depressions, I discussed at length with a psychiatrist if I was possibly bipolar. She fought against that suggestion and she did so with good resaon. As she said. the mild hypomania that I described was a totally understandable response to having just survived a lengthy depressive episode. I am not bipolar, I have never been depressed nor hypomanic without resason.

However, now that there has been very contentious and inconvenient treatment by an employer and a GP, all of a sudden it has become useful for a psychiatrist to label me as bipolar in order to explain away the problematic reality that I am presenting him with.

This is an utter disgrace and it is just an extension of the gaslighting already carried out. It is misrepresentation for a clear purpose, ie, to avoid saying my injury is a valid consequence of criminal treatment.

Regarding the title of this thread, at the assessment, I have no recollection of the psychiatrist saying he would recommend SSRI meds. I just remember him saying I needed anti-psychotic meds to get over the rumination to achieve an improved quality of life.

[Rainagain]

I don't see much to be upset about here, maybe I've missed the point?

Recommendations for ssri and CBT seems standard psych stuff?

Involvement of mental health team is useful as access to them normally requires some extreme episode?

Not sure what a differential diagnosis means, might be worth googling that?

If he doesn't put any weight behind your personal view he at least is saying stuff needs doing, he may have been dismissive of your version of events but doesn't seem dismissive of your symptoms or that actions need to be taken by NHS?

I would go for the treatment actions suggested and not worry about being believed, it makes no difference to the treatment I would say.

I'd say its useful to you, the prize is recovery not to convince the psych your old boss was a proper git, the psych wouldn't know as he didn't work for him, you know because you did.

[thetruth]

The mental health team is involved as a result of my having asked for it due to being close to suicide in the spring as a result of psychological injury caused by years of complex trauma executed by an employer and his right hand man, mistreatment the existence of which was denied by a respected doctor, causing the trauma to intensify.

The extreme episode in question was the worst EF endured yet and it was triggered by returning home to the place of all the wrongdoing after a 5 week spell away. All of this was descibed clearly to the psychiatrist and it is not hard to hear and it is not hard to understand. Neither would it be hard to describe in a report. The report does not convey these facts nor any other that was described. What the report does do is it disassembles and reframes everything I said to undermine the CPTSD cause and effect that I delivered.

Your questions perfectly demonstrate how successfully this person has purposefully confused information Rainagain. The psychiatrist has used his position and his report writing licence to deny the cause and effect that I brought to him and as a result I am invalidated.

To say that the problem was only that I had a git for an employer simply isnt adequate and doesnt begin to describe the criminal behaviours carried out by him and those with a financial/legal reason for protecting him, which included my GP. In fact the statement echos the down playing that the GP had to do in order to shirk his duty of care. Thats one of the ways that complexity was introduced to this trauma experience. Not only was the crime downplayed, it was twisted to suggest that the problem lay with my mental health. A lie of expedience which only added insult to injury.

I know recovery is the prize and with a bit of luck citalopram will help along those lines. You might see the problem had you been at the assessment, heard what was said and then read the report which doesnt reflect what was said at the assessment.

Panic disorder for 2 years? I told him I had been having emotional dysregulation as a direct result of psychological abuse going back to 2010. Thats 8 years. Why he has chosen to say 2 years is anyones guess. It has nothing to do with the facts that I brought him.

This isnt the only example of this within the report. He says something about me having a depressive episode in early 2018. He has chosen to not describe that as I did. II clearly described an emotional flashback on returning here after 5 weeks away and that the intrusive thinking about all that had happened grew to its most intense form yet experienced. I told him that the thinking has been ever present since redundancy in 2013 but sometimes I am triggered by activities, places, seeing certain people and then the thinking becomes unbearable, causing suicidal thinking when at its worst.

All of that detail has evaporated into thin air and he has redescribed what I said as, I became depressed. That wasnt what he was told so I can only deduce that he doesnt really care for what he was told.

[thetruth]

Rainagain,

My only hope now is that medication can ease the psychological chaos around all of this. Validation or justice are clearly not going to happen. Somehow I have to accept this.

If I could just get to a way of existing which involved being able to wake up in the morning and have bearable, relaxed thoughts. You must know what I mean?

The New Years resolution is to take the citalopram and allow it time to get to work. As you suggest on the other thread, I will report developments  as time goes on, and compare how I then feel to the current state.

[Rainagain]

TT,
I can see positives in your assessment report, you see it as further persecution.

It might help you to try to see the positives, to see the psych report as a potential stepping Stone to recovery.

I'm sure it fits nicely into the narrative of persecution, but seeing it in that way is not going to help you in recovery.

I've been negligently and deliberately harmed, persecuted, betrayed, wilfully harmed.

But the narrative I am working on is not about those people, its about the court case I am bringing against those people, the control over my life I am trying to gain, the future I want to aspire to for myself.

Its hard to do. Its picking through the wreckage of my life and trying to make something serviceable I can use in order to have a future.

Think tom hanks in castaway, he had bits of his old life (ups parcels) and after much trouble he came to terms with his situation and eventually got back to the world.

The world had changed, he had changed, but he started again from this new place.

You don't need to spend any more effort in obtaining validation of your situation, it happened and you know full well it happened.

So what if some people seem to deny your experience? Some people still believe the earth is flat, no use trying to engage with them.

I have a large organisation maintaining they did more for me than they were obliged to do, totally denying what they did to me.

Their view doesn't alter my view, I can't change them or their opinions, no point trying to do something impossible.

Don't see what I am saying as an attack, I'm suggesting you sift the wreckage and only keep items which are helpful to your future. That psych report could be handy so don't throw it away.

[thetruth]

I am hearing your messages Rainagain but I am only absorbing them in fits and starts as there is this obsessional  need for vindication very much alive and well in my reality which, as you point out, isn't necessarily doing me any good.

All the same it's a product of systematic lying and misrepresentation which had real life unjust implications for my life. So it dwells and it festers and inhibits recovery.

I have had glimpses of being able to compartmentalize and accept the crimes against me as just bad experiences as opposed to life destroying experiences and maybe citalopram will help me get back there.

The dream would be that citalopram would allow a raising of my mood back to a place of better balance which would allow some of life to be experienced as enjoyable and then there would be some point in being alive.

If there was some point in being alive then it might be possible to consider working again.

I'm far too young to be on the scrap heap on benefits. I want to function. I want my self esteem back. I can't have that without working.

[Rainagain]

The point of life seems to be to get back up after you have been knocked down.
Or maybe there is more to it, but getting back up is a big part of it I feel.

[thetruth]

The point of life seems to be to get back up after you have been knocked down.
Or maybe there is more to it, but getting back up is a big part of it I feel.

I suppose without that sorted first, no other point can be considered. The getting up again is the hard part when the knocking down has been so effective and multi-dimensional.

After hearing the positive reports about the ability of citalopram to take the edge off of rumination, I am hopeful this will happen for me. Id love to be able to think about things other than past mistreatment. Fingers crossed citalopram will meet my needs and my head will get a much needed break.

[thetruth]

How about going higher to NHS pals to log what has happened with gps etc.
Also finding out what the policy is with the private service around asking for a second opinion

Hi Rose,

What do you mean by NHS pals?

[thetruth]

  There were two terms consistantly running through my head as I was reading your account, and they were 'Gaslighting' and 'Systemic Violence'. Then I saw the following comment from you, and that, to my mind, is the perfect description of what Gaslighting is...

I have just discovered a true description of what happened to me. In a nutshell, it was 'ME V lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies'

Hi SJ,

Thanks so much for your help here. I am well aware of the term gaslighting and I know full well that I was a victim of gaslighting from the outset in this job. In fact, it was gaslighting that set the tone for what I always decribed as a climate of unfairness and stress during my entire time in that job.

This is where the term 'systemic violence' now comes in. Thanks you so much for bringing this to my awareness. The term can be applied to my case in a number of ways.

Following my first protest about the blanket offensiveness+pettiness of my boss, I was told that the boss was doing nothing wrong and it was me that had the problem. When I contended that I was not the person being unreasonable and that all I wanted was fairness, the boss spoke up and said, "No, you are looking for praise".

This was obscene gaslighting, the statement had no merit in any stretch of the imagination, but it serves to illustrate how willing and able this man was to misrepresent the truth in order to deny his wrongdoing.

In order to protect my job, which I loved and which I was very good at, I had to desist at this point because it was patently obvious that these 2 grown men, a boss and a right hand man, were more than willing to say anything that was needed to deny the truth.

This is how the climate of stress was initiated for me. From that point onwards stress was ever present as the company enjoyed the privilege of having the power to claim that the boss was infallible and that I was over sensitive and delusional, and they blatantly cultivated the idea that I was crazy. All the while, I single-handedly carried out their most demanding job to the highest standard they had ever seen in 35 years in business. They vehemently refused to acknowledge the true nature of this work, the skill, powers of analysis, mental and physical stamina required for it. It was highly specialised but the boss attacked me daily to belittle and to detract from the true nature of the work. He asserted that anyone could do it and it was not challenging. A massive lie, in part to make you believe you were being paid enough, in part because he is threatened by genuine competence.

So to get back to the systemic violence- it pretty much describes many aspects of the harassment that I was faced with. It also describes how my GP refused point blank to countenance providing me with support against the harassment that I faced. My GPs answer was that I could only 'move on'. I couldnt move on. I had found a job which was perfect. It had been hard to find. There were no alternative options available. My GP basically said I had no right not to be harassed and if I didnt like it, I could leave the job.

Some years later my GP would adopt the lies of my employer as truth and he would help them to have me removed from my job. He knows my boss. What my GP did was uglier that anything my employer did. He assisted my abusive employer to reframe my stress as personal psychological instability of a mysterious nature. This facilitated a deeply unfair dismissal against which I could not defend myself because my stress was nothing short of traumatic by then. By then the stress had been ongoing for 4.5 years. My GP didnt give a hoot. 12 weeks after redundancy I was in hospital getting muscles and a ligament in my forearm rejoined after smashing a mirror and a thick window with the palm of my hand. I now know that this event and the many outbursts I had at my employer were emotional dysregulation. 100% stress generated emotional dysregulation.

But the systemic violence didnt end there. Not only was the stress so bad that it was causing emotional dysregulation, the company, with the blessing of my GP, used the emotional dysregulation to bolster their lie that I was crazy and volatile.

The following quote is from 'On the Violence of Systemic Violence: A Critique of Slavoj Žižek ' by Harry van Der Linden.

"Presumably, we should include psychological violence within the common definition of violence, provided that it is narrowly understood as involving cases of extreme psychological pressure, intense humiliation, and
intimidation, constituting, as it were, an assault on the mind analogous to a physical blow to the body."

On that day when I was told by my abuser that I was looking for praise rather than fairness, this was at the end of a big tense discussion about my having made a protest about unacceptable treatment. I had endured this treatment for a year. They were saying I was imagining it ("Boss name- is doing nothing wrong, it's you that has the problem"). I became emotional. I began to cry. The unfairness was too much. This was humiliating. There was a lot of humiliation dealing with people who would not tell the truth.  The anger outbursts by me were humiliating, deeply humiliating. Again, emotional dysregulation.

Following another 3,5 years of ever more ugly and stress causing lying in this job, my GP used this ploy to try to quieten me. He said that the company could embarrass me in court by talking about my embarrassing behaviour while working for them. This is systemic violence of a very complex nature.

I hope I did not lose the train of thought I wanted to convey there. My GP was willing to frame my becoming emotional in my job as embarrassing for me , rather than to view it for what it really was, emotional dysregulation caused by harassment. The reason he was willing to do this, or interested in doing this was because he denied me any support whatsoever to try to prevent my wrongful selection for redundancy. IE he refused to say my stress was caused at work. He let them screw me over. It meant he didnt have to defend me. He could just say I was depressed like I had been before.

If this is not systemic violence then what is?

He refused to say my stress was caused at work on a sickline, even though he said it in his notes 1.5 years earlier. 2 weeks later the company which caused the stress dumped me out in order to protect themselves.

I know full well that they knew they could get away with it because they had reassurance from my GP that he would not stand in the way.

I didnt mean for this post to be so long. Thanks you SJ for bringing the term systemic violence to my awareness. I know there are a few interpretations of the term but when it is applied to extreme psychological pressure/ humiliation, I think it applies to my situation.

I mean, the way that the redundancy selection criteria were drawn up to score certain individuals as lowly as possible, regardless of the truth, is a shining example of systemic violence I think.

[thetruth]

Early in the job, before the truth denial of the company had fully blossomed, the work that I alone was doing for them was more honestly described by the boss, his right hand man and his longest serving employee.

The boss said the work that I did was, "soul destroying".

Right hand man said, " I don't know how you do it."

Longest serving employee said it was, "F**king torture."

The nature of the work was mentally demanding in that it required the development of great patience and great resilience in order to cope with the numerous frustrating setbacks that were an unavoidable part of the job. These unavoidable setbacks were all the more frustrating because the boss set unrealistic time constraints on the job. For example, he once asked me to complete a job in an afternoon (4 hours) which actually took me 6 days (54 hours). His refusal to accept reality was a large part of the conflict. He wasnt fair.

This post is just to try to convey the difficult reality of the work that I was doing, even without any harassment. Before any of the bullying, lying and betrayal, I was doing their single most demanding job. My point is, carrying out this work would have been difficult enough even with the support of the company.

Towards the end of the 4.5 years in that job, the company had become so entrenched in their refusal to be honest about my situation, they no longer admitted that my job was "soul destroying".  On the contrary, by that stage their narrative was simply that I was an unstable basket case and when they made me redundant, they did so by denying the existence of the job that I had done for them for 4.5 years, on my own. 

My GP helped them to do this.

[Boatsetsailrose]

Hi the truth
Here is a link
https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/nhs-services-and-treatments/what-is-pals-patient-advice-and-liaison-service/

[thetruth]

Hi the truth
Here is a link
https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/nhs-services-and-treatments/what-is-pals-patient-advice-and-liaison-service/

Thanks a lot Rose, for telling me abut this. Much appreciated.