Dr Gillman’s Patient Stories

These accounts are from people with whom I have recently interacted via my web site. This first gentleman’s account illustrates vividly how rapidly Parnate can be effective, despite treatment failure of, among many things:

The usual ‘guideline-recommended’ regimes with various additions and combinations 

• 38 ECT treatments
• Six weeks of daily transcranial magnetic stimulation treatments
• Multiple (and very expensive) IV ketamine doses’.
• Mono-therapy with new super Asenapine (sarcasm)

But … no MAOI, ever suggested, at all, not one tablet.

Understanding, or justifying, doctors’ pathological avoidance of Parnate, illustrated by the above peregrinations prior to Parnate, is quite beyond my understanding — I hope this story demonstrates why!

In my ‘Guidelines’ commentary I discuss why RCTs and statistics mis-direct doctors. These RCTs are all about a few rating-scale-points improvement — not complete remission of a prolonged illness within 3 or 4 weeks, like this man experienced. When you have seen a number of examples of responses such as these below — I have seen a great many — you may be inclined to re-assess your evaluation of RCT data and use Parnate more often, and sooner in the course of the illness.

Just think for a minute about the suffering, the wasted time, the expense, the distress to family, the damage to career, the deterioration of general health, that this man endured. This is the nightmare you have nightmares about.

Just contemplating this will, I hope, pain you as much as it pains me, and may make you wish you could ‘turn-down’ your capacity for empathy. And, ‘lest we forget’, for every story like this, there are the ones we will never know of, because those people did commit suicide.

Remind yourself of that, next time you are blathering like a blithering idiot about some trivial SE, like low or elevated blood pressure, or whatever***.

I should also repeat that this story is not exceptional: I am contacted by many patients with similar stories, many of whom respond dramatically and quickly to Tranylcypromine. Not everybody either wants, or finds it easy to, revisit such traumatic experiences and write an account of them. Indeed, this gentleman took some months to do it because it was a process that aroused powerful memories and emotions.

*** One can ‘blather’, or ‘blither’, but only properly be a ‘blithering idiot’: the vagaries of English are so delightfully quixotic. That may be because the vowel order is jarring; one says ‘tic, tac, toc, or tick-tock (sound of a clock). To say ‘toc, tic’ just sounds wrong — native English speakers follow this ‘rule’ without even being conscious of it. Perhaps that is why ‘blathering idiot’ never came into use?

In so far as this story is not exceptional, and one cannot say that without thinking of Dr Osheroff, recently deceased, and his legal case against the infamous ‘Chestnut Lodge’ hospital around 1980, there is an uncanny parallel to this first case report story. I will not go into the Osheroff-case in detail, comment is plastered all over the Internet, and it is a standard part of the teaching of doctors in training. For those who are interested I suggest using the search terms: Osheroff, Chestnut Lodge, Bernard Carroll, Gerald Klerman, and Mickey Nardo.

Recovery Stories

This is a new section that was not on the old website. Unlike Dr Gillman’s Patient Stories above, all the posts under this category are all written by the perspective of the recovered patient and not Dr Gillman himself. This is a purely voluntary and crowdsourced section of the website aimed at inspiring those who need hope during their time of suffering. We will not be sourcing recovery stories elsewhere to post here, it is up to individuals to email us to ensure consent. We will however provide links in the “Other Resources” section where you can find similar, although not as detailed, stories found elsewhere on the internet.

If you would like to submit your own recovery story, email in whatever format you’d like (the entire story in an email, or inside an attached Word document etc…) to spreadtheword@psychotropical.com. Please adhere to the following:

• Please supply your first name (can be fake).
• When referring to others, DO NOT supply identifiable information about others, including psychiatrists and other professionals without their explicit consent. You can use a fake name or just their first name as well as their general location (city of practice) but not the name of clinic.
• Include your diagnosis and/or prominent symptoms.
• Include what helped achieve your recovery, the more specific the better (i.e exact dosage of medications)
• Include approximate duration of suffering

Within the email, please also supply the following information as a general template:

Your Name (Can be Fake):

Post Title (Optional, otherwise defaults to “Name’s Story”): 

 By sending this email I consent to my recovery story to be published on PsychoTropical.com

Before submitting your recovery story, please have a read of other submitted recovery stories to see the general amount of information supplied and quality of writing. Only recovery stories that adhere to the above conditions and of sufficient quality will be posted, any story that does not will be replied to until it does. At any time should you want to remove your recovery story you may do so as a reply to the original email sent. Remember the purpose of this section is to help others in times of suffering as a source of hope and knowledge. We thank all those in advance who have shared their story and hope by maintaining this section of the website we can help those in need of hope.