Interesting as psychologists don't get taught medicine like doctors (where im from at least), good catch by her!
It sucks that the doctors you visited jumped to conclusions! It appears what you are suffering from is not a typical migraine, were you referred to neurologists? I don't think neurologists would prescribe SSRI's instead of a thorough check up where im studying medicine at least (academic centre).
It must be so frustrating to have doctors say your problems are caused mentally while you yourself pretty much knew it was a physical problem. How often do you have the attacks? Do you take beta-blockers to reduce the number of attacks per month/time period?
I forget how my friend arrived at her conclusion. It was almost 20 years ago and she passed away just a couple of years after we spoke about my odd symptoms, which at the time were mild and I would never think to associate with migraine, since I was ignorant and thought migraine meant a bad headache and I rarely got those.
When I first started getting seizures, it was a general family doctor who suggested it was a mental problem, because the kind of seizures I was having did not match a typical epilepsy seizure in duration and they appeared during onset of menopause, so she thought I was having psychological difficulties related to the stress of the change of life. Apparently there is some sort of mental illness that has seizure as a symptom. Since I did not fit what she knew of epilepsy, then of course it must be mental. Sigh. I had encountered that approach to diagnosis before.
Specialists do not usually, in my experience, do this sort of thing, but the gatekeepers to the specialists, the family doctors or general practitioners, have exhibited this tendency to shrug everything off as mental and write a prescription for antidepressants. Even my husband had that problem when he was first diagnosed with high blood pressure. My husband and my parents and in-laws have all learned to never see a doctor alone but to go in with a spouse or adult child to avoid being railroaded into an inadequate diagnosis without even so much as a cursory exam. Going in, answering five questions, having your vitals taken, and being sent off to the pharmacist with a prescription for antidepressants is entirely too common and entirely inadequate. I have nearly missed a heart defect diagnosis from this practice.
The neurologist was efficient and ordered many tests that ruled out brain tumor and helped her hone in on the migraine diagnosis. She has not prescribed anything to me because we chose an approach to first identify and eliminate exposure to triggers that has been extremely successful. It is a bit like finding you have a nut allergy and learning to find and avoid all the different kinds of tree nuts and pine nuts and peanuts hiding in processed food that make you sick.
Aging has helped, too. The hormonal fluctuations that occur during perimenopause exacerbate ordinary migraines. So of course they also inflame atypical migraine as well. Now that I’m past that, I am not as easy to trigger. I’ve been well for many months.
