Well. Wouldn't you know.

I gave it one more try this morning: I saw a psychiatrist recommended by a friend. I walked half an hour through downtown D.C., got to his office by 8. He was nowhere to be found. He was an hour late (of all things, he's transitioning to electronic health records [ha!] and had had a scheduling meltdown) and was a mess in so many ways. After I finished laughing at God for whatever practical joke He was playing, we started talking.

In exactly four minutes, I forgave him. I only had to talk that long before he BLEW ME AWAY. Out of the freakin' water. It was beautiful. He was like, "Yep, I get it, so this is what's happening. Let me explain." I was like, "Good God, you DO get it!" He clearly knows his stuff, and to top it off, he treated me like an intelligent and competent human being.

He even "got it" when I told him about the other terrible psychiatrist I saw. She looked like she didn't know what to do with me. He was like, "That's funny--you seem pretty straightforward to me." "That's what I think!" I said. He said, "I bet it was like this: she saw depression, she saw anxiety, and neither of them was very bad. Cause you're highly educated and highly functional and successful. So she didn't know which one to treat you for, or whether to treat you." I was like, DING! And then he spouted off some amazing insights about where psychiatry has gone wrong and that the usual categories (unipolar vs. bipolar depression vs. anxiety) are off-base because mood cycles don't always work like that and I was like, "You got yourself a patient, buster!"

This is why I'm in mental health: it's such an amazing thing when it goes right.