My deal is that I have almost perfectly med compliant for 17 years–98.6 percent of the time

05-15-2007 | Categories:

Experiential

Patient Compliance and Furious Seasons

Philip Dawdy has been blogging at Furious Seasons¹ since September 2005 from this perspective:

What I am is a long-time psych patient who has become quite skeptical about where we are with mental health in this country. I believe in accountability and an honest exchange of ideas.

He is also an award winning professional journalist who has reported for years on mental health issues and who has interviewed doctors, researchers, and hundreds of individuals with psychiatric diagnoses, which he points out

… has led me to certain conclusions, some reasoned and some more emotional. But, ultimately, my conclusions still add up to one man’s attempt to make sense of mental illness in America.

While today’s title is lifted from The Norm, Hope And Statistics, Dawdy’s 26 April 2006 post, references to his high rate of adherence to his medication regimen are prominent and frequent throughout his posts. These posts, for example, directly address compliance:

Commentary

The author’s disclaimers notwithstanding, Furious Seasons perhaps comes closer than any other blog to integrating the writer’s experiences as a patient and his point of view as a reporter in equal proportions. While posts can be strident,² there is much to admire in his thoughtful, clearly written prose. As an example, I suggest a careful reading of the post discussing his notions on recovery: Slouching Toward Recovery. While I do not endorse all its ideas and recommendations, this post is a brave and honest distillation of years of experience that has been successful in managing major, potentially disabling symptomatology.

I am, naturally enough, especially interested in how patient compliance is treated by bloggers and can find no better way to conclude this post than with an excerpt indicative of Mr. Dawdy’s no-nonsense approach:

There’s very good evidence to support that getting treatment and sticking with it wins the game in the long run. Why more people don’t get that is beyond me. Why more people aren’t willing to commit to doing the hard work of finding a med combination that works for them without turning themselves into dunces escapes me. As much as I complain about meds, there is almost always a way to find meds that will work well enough to keep you from running crazy through life, even if they aren’t a perfect fit. Finding such a situation beats the hell out of the alternatives: death, jail, a shitty reduced life, unemployment, etc. To not work at finding treatment that works more or less is utterly irresponsible–and I’ll come back to that in a future post.

Footnotes

Although I found no confirmation at Mr. Dawdy’s blog, my working assumption is that “Furious Seasons” references the title of Raymond Carver’s first published short story, which I once read as an assignment. I recall that it was Faulknerian by design and therefore dark and convoluted with a stream of consciousness style that constantly reshuffled chronology. Heavy handed psychosexual symbolism studded a melodramatic plot that featured incest and murder. OK, it wasn’t my favorite Raymond Chandler story. Independent of the story itself, the title effectively invokes the experience of bipolar disorder episodes. [back]
Other bloggers are “strident” or even “vehement;” I, on the other hand, veer toward “deeply principled.” [back]

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1 Comment

thanks for the kind words. you have the blog name source mostly right–and while it’s far from carver’s best story (in fact i think it was his first published bit), it is one of his greatest titles. the blog name is also a nod to rimbaud’s ‘a season in hell.’

Comment by Philip Dawdy — May 15, 2007 @ 1:50 pm