Is medicating mental problems worth it?

[SandyCat]

Sorry for the power level, I tried other places first and concluded I'd probably get less of a gay hug box response here. Or a bunch of shitposts, I'll take those too.

In short OCD and social anxiety hasn't ever let me have a life in the first place. The OCD is mainly "mental OCD" in my case, not the check a stove 20 times to make sure its off OCD although I have that to a lesser extent too. It's all consuming, it takes up 90% of my day every day for almost my whole life. Add social anxiety on top of that for a fun time.

I'm going to see a shrink soon now that I have insurance that will (hopefully) pay for it but based off what I read they usually like to medicate for this stuff.

My concern is I've seen what it can do to people. Wings of Redemption turned into a lexapro zombie, xannies are addictive and fucked Ethan Ralph up and Kanye West no longer hates jews after taking his goy pills.

Are my only options "jew loving horse beating chemical zombie" or "be miserable"?

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

If your problems are serious enough that they don't improve with normie advice like exercise , eating right , writing a corny journal and sticking to a consistent routine, then you are kinda fucked. Pills fuck people up and therapy is like shooting arrows in the dark in my experience.

 

[scallion]

Kiwis of a feather

 

[SandyCat]

Thanks for advice so far everyone. Especially Day Drinking's advice of becoming an alcoholic, that's the most practical advice yet. I'll trade in the sandwich for some Everclear.

I have been improving on my own lately which is nice, it makes me feel there's still hope. But life keeps tossing increasingly worse shit at me to deal with right as I make progress. It's great for forcing me to learn to improve but comes at the cost of aging me by 10 years.

 

[Little oak tree]

In short OCD and social anxiety hasn't ever let me have a life in the first place. The OCD is mainly "mental OCD" in my case, not the check a stove 20 times to make sure its off OCD although I have that to a lesser extent too. It's all consuming, it takes up 90% of my day every day for almost my whole life. Add social anxiety on top of that for a fun time.

The only way to get rid of that besides becoming a pill zombie is to embrace it until it burns you completely, to take your OCD and social anxiety to their Zenith.
I mean maybe you don't have social anxiety maybe you are a total freak who according to society should indeed be anxious about what it is, but then you will know more about yourself and be at peace with it.
It's your body trying to tell you something, so yeah silencing it or mutilating it with drugs is probably not a good idea, you can use drugs that intensify and give you the courage to cross it tho, with measure.

 

[AgendaPoster]

Go out, see sun, and run for 1 hour+ every day.
Take a rest day or two per week. It will hurt but you will just OCD through it.
Do it for a month. If at the end of the month, you're still feeling unstable and wanna see the psychiatrist, go for it.
You have nothing to lose, you already wasted years being like this, so a month of heavy physical activity cannot hurt, yes?

 

[glass_houses]

It depends. Medications are usually about balancing the benefits with the drawbacks. Sometimes the side effects are bad enough and the condition is mild enough that not taking meds is fine. Sometimes you need to balance out the concentration so you're getting a therapeutic effect without worsening side effects. Sometimes the side-effects are worth being functional. Sometimes there are no side effects. It depends on the person, and the severity of the condition. It's shit you should work out with professionals, just make sure they respect your experiences and concerns and aren't ignoring your complaints

This. It's balancing the side effects against the positives. I've been on a fuckton of medication over the years, and sometimes the side effects have been horrendous. I still have problems retaining information and general midterm memory thanks to an arsehole psych who severely over medicated me a few years back. However, without medication I'd be basically nonfunctional and I'd need a career 24/7. I might even become actively dangerous. I never hurt anyone while I was unmedicated but I was certainly planning to before I had family intervene. And even without planning I can be extremely dangerous, when I drive a car or do shit like leave the oven on all night. Therapy is fine for things like mild depression or anxiety, but when dealing with severe mental illness, it's not really effective by itself because information just isn't being processed properly.

The biggest problem with medication is that psychiatrists can either be competent at their job or not, and different medications take people different ways. If you get a shitty psych, God help you. And even with a good psych, it might take partial trial and mostly error before an effective regime is established, and side effects and withdrawal are a massive bitch. If you have a choice of psych, researching practitioners before you ask for a reference is highly recommended. If you're in a place like America where you get what you're given by insurance companies or the governmen, then I hope whatever deities you believe in are on your side.

If you do decide on medication, I strongly recommend that you combine it with therapy, as a competent therapist will both help you with your mental illness and also determine whether the specific medication you're taking is working in an acceptable manner, or whether it needs to be adjusted or changed.

There is no pill in the world that will make you 'normal'. The right medication can significantly improve your quality of life, but there is no cure for any mental illness, only treatment.

Good luck.

 

[Wine em Dine em 69 em]

It’s a crapshoot to find what works for you. Psychiatrists can learn a lot about what works for you by what doesn’t work for you, if that makes sense. A lot depends on your age, especially if you’re female.

One approach, if you don’t want an every day, rest of my life type med, is to get a med that gives your mind a break for a time period, say 6 months, while at the same time going to therapy to learn coping strategies.
By ‘giving your mind a break,’ I mean a chemical ‘vacation’ to put the brakes on the thoughts that have been running circles in your brain. You want to stop that cycle before it gets deeper engrained.
So if you go into it with say a 6 month plan, or whatever time period, of meds + therapy, you have a good chance of making permanent beneficial change in your thought process. Good luck.

 

[Moths]

Therapy plus properly trialled meds. Dont let your doctor be a retard who prescribes a heavy dose straight away.

 

[Wendy Wheelchair]

@SandyCat So a few things.

Spoiler: Psych Med Efficacy

1.) Some psych meds can be beneficial in the long-term. For example, studies have shown that kids/teens who were on therapeutic dosages of Adderall who had small pre-frontal cortexes for their age had normal ranged sizes after some years and their brains fully developing. Obviously this is only most helpful if your brain hasn't fully developed yet (<25) and have ADD. Which leads to...

Spoiler: Find origin of OCD and get tested

2.) You should try and work out where the OCD is coming from (I'll get to the anxiety later). For ADD, some people end up developing OCD as a coping mechanism as it allows them to be more alert when they're usually forgetful. Obviously most mental illnesses are co-morbid with each other, but one is often the progenitor of most of them. So finding the root of the problem is best. There are real, measurable psychometric tests that can be done to more accurately categorize your symptoms and check for various illnesses. It's more accurate than just coming in to talk to a talk therapist and having him diagnose you via just talking. Talk therapy is definitely helpful to getting at the root of some things, though, but if you can, try and get some testing done.

Spoiler: Treat anxiety with exposure therapy

3.) For anxiety, do not try and take ay medication for it as much as possible. If you have a panic attack, it's OK to have a Xanax on stand-by to get you out of the terror. But there's no "take every day" drug for reducing anxiety and the more you use things to reduce anxiety (Xanax and other benzos and pot being the most common), the higher your anxiety overall will be and the more dependent you'll be on the drugs. Exposure therapy is a proven, effective method for treating anxiety. You literally just have to experience what you're afraid of and have your mind finally realize "Oh, this isn't going to kill me and my reaction is totally disproportionate to what this is." Part of the reason successive generations are more anxious is that the helicopter parents try and remove the anxiety causing thing as much as possible so their pwecious baby doesn't get exposed to it. Obviously this makes it worse. IDK how your social anxiety works, but try and think of things that you avoid doing because of this anxiety and rank them from least to most anxiety inducing and start from the bottom and work your way up. Like for example start with making eye contact with the cashier at Walgreen's, then try going to a movie or restaurant alone, then work your way up to going to a social get together.

Spoiler: Anti-depressants

4.) Anti-depressants and other anti-psychotics should be used if you have a genuine chemical imbalance, i.e. your brain just doesn't produce enough ______. But also remember that many doctors will just prescribe/recommend anti-depressants as a catch-all. So, again, having the testing will help you avoid stuff like that. There are non-SSRI anti-depressants like Wellbutrin/Bupropion that don't have any of the common SSRI side effects most people hate and is generally well tolerated. Remember it takes 6+ weeks of regularly taking them before they have any effect so you gotta keep going with them if you decide to take them. Also many of the worst side effects occur when people do drugs and drink alcohol while on them,. If you're having mental health issues, you should be stopping that anyways as it'll help out.

Spoiler: Find a therapist easily via PsychologToday.com

5.)Use https://www.PsychologyToday.com/ to find a therapist/psychiatrist/testing place. It's very good since it has many search criteria to find exactly what you're looking for. Like you can select between women and men, the type of insurance they take, the type of issues they specialize in treating, as well as their "types of therapy". The types of therapy is very important because it'll tell you who is a legitimate psychologist and who is a licensed SJW dick stroker. Look for people who offer Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Avoid anyone who has "energy psychology" (New Age pseudoscience), "feminist", or "multicultural". Also look at their "Communities" section on their page for other red flags, as seen in this example.

So, yeah, hope that helps.

 

[Sparkling Yuzu]

It's worth it if you have a diagnosed mental disorder. Most people who claim they became "zombies" from antidepressants were just mildly sad and never had clinical depression in the first place. So their brain didn't need its chemicals changed.
Just avoid benzos and stimulants due to their addictive nature. Wellbutrin is fine though.
Meds work best when combined with psychotherapy but psychiatrists are just for figuring out your meds. Stick to empirically validated therapeutic modalities like CBT, DBT and ACT. Avoid woo like EMDR and psychoanalysis/psychodynamic therapy.
If it's covered for you, I found Trintellix to be really good. It has cognitive enhancing effects independent of the antidepressant effect, which other SSRIs don't have. It will make you think clearer. Buspar is good for anxiety if you don't want to use addictive benzos. Wellbutrin is good for fatigue and can be combined with SSRIs for greater antidepressant effects.
Good blog breaking down the evidence for psychiatry:

antidepressants Archives - Debunking Denialism

debunkingdenialism.com

How Anti-Psychiatry Researchers Attack Antidepressants With Faulty Statistics - Debunking Denialism

They use an outdated criteria that would reject psychotherapy and many medications generally.

debunkingdenialism.com

Large-scale randomized control trials (RCTs) show that antidepressants are effective against depression, but they are not miracle medications that works perfectly for everyone (NICE, 2009b; Turner et al. 200. Research has shown that the best available treatment involves a combination of antidepressants and psychotherapy (and perhaps some exercise) and these often work better together than only getting one of them alone (e. g. Nemeroff et al., 2003).

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

But there's no "take every day" drug for reducing anxiety

Buspar needs to be taken everyday. SSRI's are often used for anxiety.

I recommend CBT. It's a very humbling therapy.

 

[AgendaPoster]

I see a LOT of people relying heavily on medication and therapy, which makes me sad.
Bit of PL, psychiatry was originally the specialty I wanted to pursue, but in the end I chose something else.
The psychiatric meds mentioned are not cures. They are tools to tame symptoms that we consider undesirable socially at that point in time, and psychiatry changes quite often in what it chooses to medicalize. You will never be cured, as it is the case with other illnesses, like for example, gastrointestinal ulcers. You will simply be pushed pharmacologically towards what we consider sane, with adverse effects, and various amounts of success.
Most common psychiatric issues, like depression, are probably 90% cause by some sort of incompatibility with society or severe unhappiness with oneself, trauma etc.
To fix those, you need to fix the root causes. Medication can be fine, but I would avoid it if you're not suicidal or experiencing severe illness that is incapacitating. Try first to deal with life, specifically what makes you stressed and unhappy. Is it poverty/financial insecurity? Try to find another job. Body image issues/loneliness? Sports, sports, sports. Outside. Diet, working out. Family problems? Abusive boyfriend? Leave him.
Some of this shit is radical and will leave you imbalanced, but you'll be fine as you adapt.
Meds will just mellow you down and make you more indifferent to your issues. If that's what you want, fine, but IMO it's not ideal.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

I see a LOT of people relying heavily on medication and therapy, which makes me sad.
Bit of PL, psychiatry was originally the specialty I wanted to pursue, but in the end I chose something else.
The psychiatric meds mentioned are not cures. They are tools to tame symptoms that we consider undesirable socially at that point in time, and psychiatry changes quite often in what it chooses to medicalize. You will never be cured, as it is the case with other illnesses, like for example, gastrointestinal ulcers. You will simply be pushed pharmacologically towards what we consider sane, with adverse effects, and various amounts of success.
Most common psychiatric issues, like depression, are probably 90% cause by some sort of incompatibility with society or severe unhappiness with oneself, trauma etc.
To fix those, you need to fix the root causes. Medication can be fine, but I would avoid it if you're not suicidal or experiencing severe illness that is incapacitating. Try first to deal with life, specifically what makes you stressed and unhappy. Is it poverty/financial insecurity? Try to find another job. Body image issues/loneliness? Sports, sports, sports. Outside. Diet, working out. Family problems? Abusive boyfriend? Leave him.
Some of this shit is radical and will leave you imbalanced, but you'll be fine as you adapt.
Meds will just mellow you down and make you more indifferent to your issues. If that's what you want, fine, but IMO it's not ideal.

Medication is best used when there's no other viable option. An autistic person prone to meltdowns due to overstimulation could just never leave the house, but that's not realistic.

 

[SandyCat]

I recommend CBT. It's a very humbling therapy.

Is it normal for the therapist to want me to wear a gimp suit for CBT?

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Is it normal for the therapist to want me to wear a gimp suit for CBT?

Yes. Electric nipple clamps are also normal.

 

[glass_houses]

I see a LOT of people relying heavily on medication and therapy, which makes me sad.
Bit of PL, psychiatry was originally the specialty I wanted to pursue, but in the end I chose something else.
The psychiatric meds mentioned are not cures. They are tools to tame symptoms that we consider undesirable socially at that point in time, and psychiatry changes quite often in what it chooses to medicalize. You will never be cured, as it is the case with other illnesses, like for example, gastrointestinal ulcers. You will simply be pushed pharmacologically towards what we consider sane, with adverse effects, and various amounts of success.
Most common psychiatric issues, like depression, are probably 90% cause by some sort of incompatibility with society or severe unhappiness with oneself, trauma etc.
To fix those, you need to fix the root causes. Medication can be fine, but I would avoid it if you're not suicidal or experiencing severe illness that is incapacitating. Try first to deal with life, specifically what makes you stressed and unhappy. Is it poverty/financial insecurity? Try to find another job. Body image issues/loneliness? Sports, sports, sports. Outside. Diet, working out. Family problems? Abusive boyfriend? Leave him.
Some of this shit is radical and will leave you imbalanced, but you'll be fine as you adapt.
Meds will just mellow you down and make you more indifferent to your issues. If that's what you want, fine, but IMO it's not ideal.

Situational depression is frequently medicated when it doesn't need to be, and grief and mourning is also frequently medicated, even when it's normal behaviour and appropriate to the situation. A lot of reliance on medication is unnecessary and you do see a lot people who had more success in changing their life than changing their medication. However, there is a significant part of the population whose brains just don't operate in a way that allows for a functional life, and that part of the population is growing. Thanks to said medication and the internet, people who were not seen as appropriate mates in the bad old days and were never able to reproduce are reproducing now, and it's a fuckhuge problem. I'm hooked into the autistic community, all of the mothers have multiple children that are also autistic, and spouses who are either diagnosed with autism themselves or else bloody well should be. Autism and bipolar disorder run in my family. For some of us it's an advantage. One of my brothers is the cliched autistic mathematical genius and is hugely successful in his field, on an international level. Completely hopeless with humans and a right pig ignorant, arrogant arsehole, but he's brilliant. My father has an obscure type of bipolar where he only slept two hours a night for the majority of his life. He slogged away at menial jobs for many years, but when he turned pro, he ended up building an entire government department from scratch and was on a state government level by the time of his inevitable breakdown.

Some mentally abnormal traits persist in the population because they're useful at some level, but the checks to stop those traits from becoming prevalent and too profound for functional living are no longer there. I cannot function without medication. I barely function with it. Traits that are useful in other forms have manifested in ways that are detrimental to myself as an individual. I made the conscious choice to get out of the gene pool. Unfortunately, a lot of people who shouldn't be in there, are. Modern medicine is a boon to the individual, but it's really fucking up the human species long term.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

SSRIs ruined my dads life and made me untrust psych meds.

 

[AgendaPoster]

I cannot function without medication. I barely function with it.

It's a completely different degree of seriousness when the illness is debilitating, then you just do what you need to do to get by and continue with life. It's not much different than giving cancer patients with severe pain opiates galore. You know they'll get addicted, you know they'll have severe adverse effects, you know they'll likely get more and more tolerant and require more of the drug or a change to an even more potent opiate. But that's just what you have to do to alleviate their pain and make them comfortable for their last 100m.

 

[Cats]

I share pretty much everything about my life here so I guess this isn't too far of a stretch. I had back problems as a teenager and this was long before the "opioid crisis" was a thing, when docs were still giving out 120-count vicodin scripts for toothaches and shit. Long story short I was on Oxy80s for years and years, from 16 into my mid 20s. I was never a complete slave to them and functioned very highly but they caused me to do dumbass shit like get married way too young to the wrong fucking woman and miss out on so many opportunities because of all the stupid shit I did when I was laid out on pills I genuinely feel like the first half of my 20s was kinda wasted. So many investments of time and love and energy into shit that if I was sober I would have seen was just not worth it.

Of course I quit, which was a mountain to climb in itself, and everything felt different. It took me years to become normal again. So during that time that led me to making almost the exact same mistakes all over again before I finally got my shit together and while I have never classified myself as being a "drug" person, I do recognize the power they can hold over a life. In my case it was small potatoes compared to some of the other shit I see from actual junkies out there. It's sad. I don't think I am a good model for comparison when it comes to depression, because I legit have never really felt like my life was not a success or that I was worthless or whatever, but I can tell you this:

I would say don't take any drugs and if you are, stop. Stop taking shit. Just stop. Stop drinking, smoking etc. I might even go as far as to say that if your condition is mild enough and not crippling, then stop taking even what the doctors have prescribed you (please don't do this if you NEED your medicine to live or to function at all, or if stopping them could harm you; I am not talking about actual lunatics or medical issues requiring drugs or stopping potentially harmful drugs cold turkey) Doctors these days often overprescribe shit or just toss pills at people to make them feel like they have done something about their problems.

My best advice would be to learn to love exercising. Exercise is KEY to a healthy and happy life. Trust me. Force yourself at first if you have to. Start slow and work your way up to a healthy 3-4+ days a week of exercise and walking. Walking is really good. Good for mind and body. Learn to live with you, learn to LOVE you. Soon as you can do that soooooo many perceived "illnesses" will melt away and doors will open wide for you. This isn't advice on how to achieve anything in particular, like a girlfriend or boyfriend or job or car because that is all mostly bullshit when people try and do that. But you will find that life is so much easier if you can get in an exercise routine and stay clean, and learn to love yourself.

Good luck kiwi

 

[Matt Damon]

4.) Anti-depressants and other anti-psychotics should be used if you have a genuine chemical imbalance, i.e. your brain just doesn't produce enough ______.

God, I hate when people spout this bullshit. There's no practical way of measuring neurotransmitter levels in a living brain. If there's no way to measure them, there's no way to determine a baseline across a population. If you can't determine a baseline across a population, there's no basis for claiming someone has a "chemical imbalance".

If anybody doubts me, please try to find what "normal" serotonin or dopamine or norepinephrine synapse levels are - it ought to be easy if "chemical imbalances" are such an epidemic. Please go to a doctor and ask to have your levels tested and see what they say. This is unsubstantiated pharma marketing bullshit, not medical science.