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Mental Illness and Medication

Although I struggle with the stigma associated with therapy, I don’t have any qualms with taking psychiatric medications. Well, I don’t like the side effects, but no one ever does. Every medication has some sort of side effect, from over the counter ibuprofen to the life sustaining prescription stuff. Side effects are just something you have to learn to deal with then you have a condition that requires treatment in the form of medication. I also don’t like the fact that I have to take meds in general, but again, I think that’s common to anyone who has a condition that requires treatment with medication, whether it’s diabetes, which requires insulin, or high blood pressure, which requires diuretics or beta-blockers. The trick is finding the medication that works the best with the most tolerable side effects. Fortunately, unlike a lot of diseases, in the mental illness spectrum, there are an awful lot of options as far as medications are concerned. If one doesn’t work, or if one has really bad side effects, there are 50 more to try next.

Mental illness is a physical illness. It might very well be all in your head, but that’s only because it’s literally in your head. It’s messed up brain chemicals and brain wiring that causes it. Go to www.brainplace.com and check out the scans of the brains of normal people compared to the brains of people who have various mental illnesses. There’s a definite and noticeable difference. Here’s another thought: medications which are typically used to treat epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are also sometimes prescribed off label to treat various mental illnesses. Why? Because they work on the same brain chemicals. The same messed up chemicals that cause epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are the same chemicals that when messed up in different ways, can cause depression or bipolar disorder. I don’t think anyone questions that epilepsy and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are real diseases that require treatment with medication. The same holds true for mental illnesses.

For some of the most thorough information about psychiatric medications on the internet, visit www.crazymeds.org. This website contains everything that you need to know about whatever meds your doc has decided to give you, plus a whole bunch of stuff that your doc probably can’t tell you even if you know to ask. It’s written by a couple of folks who can speak first hand about what these meds can do and the conditions they’re supposed to treat and how they go about doing both of those things.

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I also don’t like the fact that I have to take meds in general, but again, I think that’s common to anyone who has a condition that requires treatment with medication, whether it’s diabetes, which requires insulin, or high blood pressure, which requires diuretics or beta-blockers.