This will be my fifth. I have an appointment with a new shrink in a month or two. This doesn’t bring on any stress or anxiety; I’ve done this a hundred times before. His bio on the website looks impressive and he specialises in schizophrenia, which gives me some reassurance. My fingers are crossed, but it’s a long way off yet. The only thing that makes me a little nervous about the appointment is that it’s in the same rooms as my old psychiatrist, whom I haven’t seen for over twelve months. I know it’s no big deal — things just didn’t work out on our last, rather distant consultation. The worst that can happen is he might see me sitting in the waiting area. I’m sure he encounters situations like this all the time. I’m fairly certain I’m worrying for no reason at all.
Hopefully I click with this new fella. One thing that really bothers me is that he charges six hundred dollars for a half‑hour consultation. This feels ridiculous. I’m on a disability pension… how am I supposed to afford this? I get some refund through Medicare but it still leaves me needing to find that initial amount. How can a doctor reasonably request such huge sums?
I saw my past psych for fourteen years, so we have a long history together. The referral was sent to him, but he’s taking a heap of time off, so this new guy was the best they could do in the meantime. Even when my old boss gets back, he’ll have hundreds of missed appointments to go through, so I probably wouldn’t see him for over twelve months or more. The reason I stopped seeing him was that I used to take Clozapine, and he was one of only a few doctors who could prescribe it — this arrangement lasted for fourteen years. After a conversation, he decided to stop the Clozapine because it wasn’t working for me, and he put me back on Seroquel, at a fairly large dose. That medication can be prescribed by any GP, so that’s who I now go through; it rather made my old shrink redundant. I’d love to use his name, but you know how these things work, and it’s better to leave it out. What bothers me about psych’s is that I as the patient spill my guts about the most personal things and are my soul yet I know nothing about them. With my last all I managed to get out of him was how many children he had. That was the extent to what I knew about him. After fourteen years! That’s the name of the game I guess.
I have nothing but good things to say about my GP. This is veering off the title of this post so I won’t go into details here, but suffice it to say he is consistently professional, attentive, and I feel at ease with him.