Medication

What can I say about medication?

If I am being totally honest, I don’t know if I believe medications work.  It’s not that I don’t think my illness has a biological component and I believe medication definitely has brought many people relief, but for myself, I do not know if it’s ever made even the slightest difference.  Taking my medication is an exercise, not in blind faith, more like blind habit.  I know I am supposed to take it, and if I don’t, I will be somehow viewed as self-destructive. 

I’ve said to myself, many a times, usually in my darker moments, if the medication is altering me, altering my mind and body away from its authentic self, and my authentic self thinks death is the right decision, shouldn’t I honor my authentic self?

My friends said she’d be dead from a dog bite if she’d said no to the rabies shot that would alter her authentic self.  I see her point. 

I’ve noticed the awful side effects of all of the drugs I’ve been on, but I’ve never noticed their benefits.  My depression has been so unpredictable, heavily influenced by outside stressors, dependent on changing environments, and I often suddenly make a drastic turn for the worse after seemingly being on a road of gradual improvement. With all the factors at play and no clean narrative, how could I possibly assess the role of the drugs?  I am also a firm believer that the nature of the illness is that it has its ups and downs, and if you had no treatment at all, you could be riding those very same waves.  

Some people describe the a-ha moment, when the combination of drugs, after many tries, finally provides relief.  I have not known that moment. 

Well, let’s do a quick rundown, for those who know, will know.  Mind you every person reacts differently to individual drugs… but maybe others will witness the frustration in the experimentation process. Non-depressed people think psychiatrists have some sort of idea or ahem, science, in how they prescribe these things, but it’s totally, one hundred percent, a guessing game (like so much of medicine) and, more often than not, we are prescribing ourselves. 

Prozac — they thought it helped until months later they thought it made me worse (very likely if I’m incompatible with SSRIs), Wellbutrin – I’ve stabilized while being on Wellbutrin a couple of times, but I could never attribute it to the drug, who is specifically supposed to help my energy and concentration, but it also makes me nauseous and fucks with my sleep, Cymbalta – did jack for shit, Provigil – made me feel like I was hopped up on a recreational drug, it’s technically for narcolepsy and insurance won’t cover it for depression anymore, Lexapro – made me so exhausted I thought I was going to collapse by 5:30 pm everyday, Lamictal – a mood stabilizer, brought in for my BPD/bipolar/self-harming emotionally dysregulated self, always taken with multiple other drugs, so unsure if it does jack all, Effexor – made me so emotionally numb, therapist thinks it’s to blame for my worst suicidal episode, and the withdrawal was like getting off heroin and hellish, Zoloft, – seemed fine in a small dose mixed with others but on it’s own at effective dose made me manic, Abilify – also seemed okay in low does when mixed with others, but increased it made me so restless it literally felt like I was being tortured. 
And there are others.

God bless Ativan though.  Those benzos are a lifesaver. 

They say people who react badly to SSRIs as I have, could be this soft bipolar as described in my Dissecting a Diagnosis post, or just suffer from severe depression that is resistant to medication.  Lithium was sold to me as the best answer to my prayers.  I was told that Lithium had a bad rap, because Bipolar I (One) people don’t like how it numbs them out and they lose the positive aspects of mania they like, but for someone like me, at a low dose, it’ll do the job.  They said, it’s the only drug that has scientific backing that it reduces suicidality, and because it’s just a salt, there’s long ago been no patent, so it’s super cheap. It’s not promoted, because Big Pharma doesn’t want people taking it since they want people to take their fancier more expensive new drugs they are advertising. 

But after thinking the lithium was working, I had a bad weekend, with no discernible trigger, and two weeks later, I was overwhelmed with suicidal thoughts and checking myself into the mental hospital.  

For a year, we literally changed my combination and dosages of drugs every 3 weeks.  No magic moment was ever reached.
Even so, my doctor says that if I had not been off drugs at the time of my relapse –I was off drugs for a year and doing well, my decision to go off was due to physical problems I was having and wanting to assure myself the drugs were not the cause—if I had been still taking meds at the time an extreme stressor entered my life, I wouldn’t have fallen so hard and the recovery wouldn’t have been so prolonged ( I don’t know that it’s over).  She said I should stay on mood stabilizers for the rest of my life as a preventative measure, as a prophylactic. 

This requires a huge leap of faith.  I don’t know that I believe any of it. 

Even though I have fully embraced the fact that I have a life-long chronic illness, and no longer think that I will be able to, at some point, tuck it away as a relic from my past— I always want to stop being on medication.  Always.  Every pill I swallow I hate with fervor.  And they still make me nauseous. 

For a long time, when my family refused to believe I had a mental illness, they would repeatedly tell me not to take the medication.  They would tell me not to trust the doctors.  And it would make me so angry.  But I can’t honestly say that I don’t tell myself the same thing still, years later. 

Other than complaining about side effects, I rarely discuss the whole medication piece of my illness with any of my friends or family.  I have too much inner conflict.  I don’t want someone to agree that medications don’t work, because sometimes that’s a sign they don’t believe in mental illness at all and think if I meditated more, I’d be fine.  I also don’t want someone to think medication is the key, have too much faith in medicine and then gently scold me or express concern if I stop taking it or keep reassuring me I’ll eventually find the right combination. 

I do sincerely believe, probably because it was true in the past, if things in my life lined up in a way where the environment I was living in wasn’t toxic or treacherous, I wouldn’t need medication.  But it seems I am destined to never find those safe environments and the only safety I can guarantee myself is in death.      

What can I say about medication?
I don’t have anything insightful to share.