Gogo Lidz: Survivor, Mental Health Care Reform Advocate

[Deborah]

This young woman experienced in all fraudulent dx, excess rx drugs, attempted suicide, accidental overdose, wilderness "therapy", and rehab. How many others?

Aug 3 2007 3:58 PM EDT

Mental-Health Care Reform Advocate Gogo Lidz: You Need To Know Me
Following a bad diagnosis, the then-teen was prescribed more than a dozen drugs — the exact opposite of what she needed.
By Jennifer Vineyard

RED HOOK, New York — When Gogo Lidz first went to a child psychiatrist in eighth grade, she got a one-word diagnosis — adolescence. The second time, when she was a sophomore in high school, she wasn't so lucky.
"During my first session, the doctor wanted to screen me for ADD, so he started asking me, 'Do you make careless mistakes? Do you get sidetracked? Do you have trouble following through on things?' " the 22-year-old recalled. "And I started going, 'Yeah, yeah, all of them,' because I felt like he was talking from my playbook."

In hindsight, she realized, "Everyone makes careless mistakes, everyone gets sidetracked." She said she shouldn't have agreed so easily because the next thing she knew, she had a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder. At first, she was told to take Ritalin.

(Watch Gogo Lidz tell her story of misdiagnosis and overmedication.) at this link
http://www.mtv.com:80/news/articles/156 ... ndex.jhtml

It's become a common story for kids growing up in America these days: If you have trouble concentrating in school (and especially if your grades have dropped), you're a candidate for an ADD diagnosis. But as it turns out, Gogo didn't have ADD — she was bipolar. Instead of making her better, the increasing number of prescription drugs she was given made her progressively worse. So now Gogo is writing a book, tentatively titled "Life on the Pharm," about what happened to her, as a cautionary tale.

"I feel like my story will help other people know what's going on," she said. "The point of my book is not to portray me as a victim, but to raise questions about what these doctors are doing, because there are a lot of people who trust doctors with their lives. Doctors are supposed to make you better, pills are supposed to make you better. People don't think that maybe it's making you worse."

Granted — and Gogo is the first to admit it — not everything was the fault of her doctor.  :roll: Rather than asking questions when she didn't understand his instructions or warnings about possible side effects, she would nod dumbly as he used phrases like cyclothymia (mood disorders) or acute dystonia (muscle spasms). It made no sense to her, so she didn't think that consuming alcohol and marijuana might blur the line between symptoms and side effects. At times, it was hard to tell what drug was causing what reaction. Over the course of five years, her doctor responded by prescribing her even more medication — Metadate, Dextrostat, Dexedrine Spansules, Adderall, Adderall XR, Stattera, Effexor, Zyprexa, Ambien, Abilify, Lexapro, Lamictal, Provigil, Wellbutrin and Cymbalta. If that list sounds as confusing as it looks, try to imagine the effect it had on Gogo's system.

"I felt like I was going from being near-sighted to having X-ray vision," she said. "At first, it made it so much easier to do work, but after awhile, I just started losing weight rapidly. I wasn't able to sleep. I would get angry all the time. I was getting incredibly manic. I was driving everybody nuts. I'd become a tweaked-out whiz kid in one sense, and in the other, I was sort of like a monster."

Nothing was helping. The anti-anxiety drugs made her anxious; the sleep aids made it harder for her to sleep; the anti-depressive drugs made her depressed, even suicidal; and the anti-psychotic drugs made her psychotic. And then there were the hard-to-ignore physical side effects. Four weeks into her second semester at college, she took a muscle relaxant for menstrual cramps and had a near-cardiac arrest, thanks to the drug's interaction with her prescribed stimulant Adderall XR. She had to be taken, unconscious, to the emergency room. (The following year, Adderall XR was temporarily taken off the market in Canada due to the risk of sudden death.)

Still, she didn't question the prescriptions or her doctor. Her psychiatrist had warned her to stop taking the drugs if she became manic — but he didn't define the term, so she didn't recognize the symptoms. "I had a roommate who used to be manic, and I thought, 'Well, I'm not like her, so I must not be,' " she said. "But it's a different definition than what I now see that it was." Manic for Gogo meant it was hard for her to keep still and even harder to stop talking. By the end of the day, she'd curl up in bed and cry for a long time. "I felt like killing myself," she said.

So she tried. Twice. Unable to control her impulses, Gogo overdosed on painkillers and slashed her wrists with broken glass. "I was just on a roller coaster of manic episodes and depressive episodes," she said. "If I thought of something, I'd have to do it. I thought of killing myself, like, 10 minutes beforehand. It wasn't something I had planned for days. It would just be, 'This is what I'm doing now.' I didn't think it through."

[Good ol Program "therapy".][/color]

Now Gogo thinks that her doctor sent her to rehab to cover up his mistake of overprescribing her amphetamines and antidepressants. Once she sought a second opinion in rehab, the psychologist realized Gogo was actually bipolar and that the drugs she was on were the wrong treatment — the exact opposite of what someone who is bipolar should take. "I'd been stuck in this Catch-22," Gogo said. "I went through this giant ordeal, which made me crazy, and finally I was vindicated. If it had been caught earlier, I wouldn't have had to go through all that."

About to finish her senior year at Bard College in upstate New York this fall, Gogo first shared her story earlier this year in an article for New York magazine called "My Adventures in Psychopharmacology."
[ http://nymag.com/news/features/260006/ ]
The piece led to the book, which has a tentative May release date. It also made her the poster child for the mental-health care reform movement, since her experience exposes the need for more evidence-based medicine, patient/doctor face time, monitoring of side effects and consumer education about psychiatric treatments.

"I'm not anti-prescription, I'm not anti-drugs," Gogo emphasized. "It was just that I had blindly put my faith in my doctor for years. I just assumed he knew what he was doing — he's a doctor, you're supposed to trust a doctor."

More than anything now, Gogo has learned to trust herself, to know when something just doesn't feel right, and to get the right kind of help. "Who I was then is not who I am now. I'm better now."

[Deborah]

Another Industry "Success Story".  Good lord. This young woman is a survivor by sheer luck.
From the article "My Adventures in Psychopharmacology"

Dr. Titrate said he doubted I had “suicidal ideations” and recommended that I be sent to a substance-abuse-treatment facility. He told my parents, “You can, of course, seek a second opinion.” But there didn’t seem to be time for that. Dr. Titrate spoke with great urgency: He wanted me in the facility within 48 hours. I crumpled in hysterics on his office floor.

Dr. Titrate recommended a consultant, and the consultant recommended a treatment program in Utah. It cost $450 a day and was not covered by my parents’ insurance. The next morning, I was shipped off to a remote campsite in the High Uinta Mountains.
[Anyone care to speculate which program?]
This wilderness program was designed specifically for drug addicts and alcoholics. Dr. Titrate had assured my parents that although I wasn’t technically an addict, the treatment would be beneficial.

But the field therapist—a recovering alcoholic in battle fatigues—and her staff of instructors didn’t seem to be in on the secret. They treated me like the worst kind of addict: one who was in denial. “Acknowledge your addiction, or you’re not getting out of here,” one of the instructors told me.

My attitude baffled the instructors, and I was routinely disciplined with silence and the withholding of hot food. When informed of my resistance, Dr. Titrate upped my daily intake of Lexapro again, to three times the normal dose.
[Idiots. Wonder who this Shrink is, which Ed Con he works with, and which program they refer to.]

I should note that I was over 18 and technically could have left the program at any time. But leaving was not really an option. Dr. Titrate had given my parents strict instructions: If I phoned and said I planned to come home, they were to say I wasn’t welcome. I would be stranded with no money in the mountains of Utah.

I had little to no contact with the outside world during this time. My mother and father had weekly hour-long phone conversations with the field therapist, who, in turn, had weekly hour-long phone conversations with Dr. Titrate. My parents could send e-mails to the center, but anything deemed “nontherapeutic” was withheld from me.

The letter that did get through was one they were required to write: an Go through the motions, she told me[/b], and no one will pay attention. Instead of letters to God, I jotted down Ludacris lyrics and dated them. She was right: Nobody noticed the difference.

I suffered panic attacks with greater and greater frequency. One attack was so frightening that I finally demanded to see a psychiatrist. He decided to start weaning me off Lexapro, replace it with the milder antidepressants Wellbutrin and Cymbalta, and increase my dosage of Lamictal.

Around this time, the Utah program mailed me a box of computer printouts— the e-mails my parents had sent that were deemed “nontherapeutic” and withheld.  :rofl: One was an article about cognitive behavioral therapy—a treatment Dr. Titrate had always dismissed. After I read it, I set up an appointment.

When I related my personal history and described my symptoms to the cognitive behavioral therapist, she said, “You don’t sound like an addict. You sound like you’re bipolar II, a form of manic depression.”

She asked for the names of the drugs I was taking.

“Provigil, Lexapro …”

“Lexapro! Do you have any idea what effects that drug can have on bipolar people?”

At the end of the session, I called home and told my parents. My father found a Website that cross-indexed syndromes with drugs. Patients detail their reactions. He typed in bipolar and Lexapro. A sampling: “When first started on 10mg, about 2 hours later felt insane amount of energy, was zooming, felt very speedy. Then shortly after that same day I crashed and couldn’t get out of bed” … “I had euphoria/irritability like never before” … “Manic and then wanting to kill myself all in 15 minutes time.”

He flew to California the next morning. We met at my halfway house and drove to the behavioral therapist’s office. “Your daughter has been misdiagnosed and mis-prescribed,” she said. I felt ecstatic and oddly vindicated. She said antidepressants may be used in adolescent bipolar depression in the acute phase, but only under cover of a mood stabilizer to calm potential manic storms. She said Dr. Titrate should have prescribed Lamictal first, then waited for the mood stabilizer to, well, stabilize me. Then he could have tacked on an antidepressant, but not Lexapro, one of the more volatile and potentially mania-inducing of the lot.

According to this psychiatrist, the stimulants used to treat my alleged ADD may have intensified my bipolar disorder. Adderall, she explained, can cause dysphoria, a symptom of depression defined as a “generalized feeling of discontent.” Dr. Titrate had never warned us that stimulants could complicate depression or hasten the onset of bipolar disorder in kids prone to it.

The behaviorist said the addiction therapy I’d been subjected to was pretty much a wash, and possibly counterproductive. Five months and $75,000 worth of rehabilitation, all for nothing. “This is so typical of the so-called treatment bipolar II patients receive,” the therapist said. “The disorder is usually only diagnosed after everything else is ruled out.”

When my father and I got back to the halfway house, he called Dr. Titrate. I listened in while he recounted the recent turn of events. Dr. Titrate was mostly silent. At the end of the conversation he said, “I admit I’ve made some mistakes. I have a conscience. But, at this point, what can I do?”...... :rofl:

I haven’t heard from Dr. Titrate since an envelope bearing his name and return address arrived at my home. Inside was a bill for $250, his consulting charge for my father’s last phone call. My dad and I had a good laugh over that.  :rofl:

[Anonymous]

Un fucking believable.  This is why the TTI has been allowed to exist and grow.  It's in the mainstream.  These aren't what Mr. and Mrs. Joe Middle America would consider "quacks".  These are credentialed medical professionals that buy into this shit.  The sheeple trust the doctors without question.  It's sickening.

Good find Deb.