nccotus

Remembering who I was before being struck by Sharon Shrensel.

For the longest time all I could remember was the sinking feeling I had as I walked into her office and what happened immediately afterwards. We talked about a few things and she said, “come back in two weeks;” and made an appointment with me.

the upshot there was that I became depressed and suicidal when I was neither before I met this person. I was suffering from nervous exhaustion and frantic about the trouble that I was in with some very important people both among my peers and in the world beyond Harvard. This led my mother to call me arrogant. She deemed it arrogant that I felt I had failed as “President of the Harvard Advocate” and she asserted that people were happy with what i had done there. There was now way to explain. Down about the next 4 years it was a lot like Francis Farmer, the Hollywood actress whose mother put her in a state hospital because she wanted to quit acting and come home and be married and live a normal life.

A long time later someone in the street outside my apartment called me on a remark I made about her. I said I never listen to my mother. And saw instantly how stupid that sounded.

It’s about the wart-mole that was removed. It gave me a deeply sarcastic attitude because of pain and confusion. I made a similar remark about my father once that doesn’t bear repeating. Quite shocking.

Back to the Advocate.

Sharon really blew that up for me and made a mess of me. She blew my mother up all wrong. I just realized as I came to write this post that MD psychiatrist B. Silver was covering for her, easily patronizing my mother in a way that infuriated me but that I couldnt read at the time.

Dr. Lipsey picked up on all of this 12 years later in the HOPKINS malpractice and took a cue from it to send me on down the liberty my oblivion. Too many reputations at stake.

I never saw this more clearly.

Hopkins contacted ALL my old providers as they routinely do in their inpatient cases.

I don’t know whether they contacted Dr. Schatzberg, a famous psychiatrist who worked out of a similarly famed hospital in Belmont, MA whom I saw about 3 times while I was being counseled by Dr. Harry Penn, an excellent psychoanalyst in Cambridge, MA whom they did contact. Dr. Schatzburg gave me one piece of advice that guided me through most of those early years in the hands of psychiatrists. He said, “Stay on the major tranquilizers.” (In other words, the “older” anti-psychotic meds.). At the time, there was nothing else available.

I have never questioned Lipsey’s judgment in stopping the Navane (an older med but I am torn between doing so now and-to accentuate the positive—considering instead that the time for resting on those meds had come to an end. Still, I do see how cleanly they induced the terrifying breakdown in Germantown, tapering me down to 2 mg of the navane, down from 7, after flattering me about it, and then leaving me in my fragile mind to do what I always do in a fragile situation —I was left to make the decision to stop the last 2 mg in my own. It was a given that at would do this. I am DISGUSTED but totally healed by what I am seeing here. That while sick sorry breakdown in fast paced Germantown, MD—after gentle, delicate Buffalo—was orchestrated down to the moment. I am so far from rage I have hilarity over this. My poor child, Ian r uk?