Can taking medication enough that it permanetly changes your

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Can taking medication enough that it permanetly changes your mind even without the medication, like say you stop taking it, can it change your neurology over the years for the better?

It can cause brain damage. Depending on the type of medication, it can also cause Tourette's-like tics.

Every day your brain is being structured and restructured. That's why thought patterns can get stuck for good or bad. If an anti-depressant gets you out of bad thought patterns by healing depression, then yes, I think medication can AID in making a permanent change, but it's not the medication itself that's doing it.

Brain damage is more common than any positive changes.

However, many medications will support your brain while you are going through an episodic mental illness, and allow you to recover more quickly. For example, someone with schizophrenia taking a neuroleptic will have, ideally, shorter or no active episodes of schizophrenia. Or someone with recurrent depression will have a shortened episode of depression, and fewer relapses.

So, no, medications can't change your neurology directly, at least not for the better. But they can indirectly affect your neurology by allowing you to recover from episodic mental illness more quickly, and preventing the illness from re-wiring your brain in inefficient ways--like the way that someone with long-term depression will have automatic thought patterns that are more depressive than realistic, or the way that someone with schizophrenia and multiple unmedicated episodes will not respond as quickly to medication and have a higher chance of relapse.

It's more of a prevention thing than anything else--more like, "Medication can stop this mental illness from doing bad things to your brain," rather than, "Medication will do good things to your brain in the long run." Medications have side effects, and every prescription is a trade-off between benefits and drawbacks.

If you're talking about medication for non-episodic neurological disorders, then no. Autism, ADHD, dyslexia, etc., don't improve due to medication. They "improve" when the person develops naturally and learns useful strategies. However, comorbid conditions like general anxiety disorder, depression, and other mental illnesses can and do respond to medication; and when they do, the person is able to learn more quickly and efficiently, no longer hampered by the mental illness.

Look up Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz's research, author of the highly popular book Brain Lock. For those with OCD, medication and CBT both can rewire the brain to show less activation in areas that have too much activity, such as the orbitofrontal cortex. The most common change that psychiatric medications have on the brain is a chemical change rather than a structural change. This is why they aren't cures for disorders; they are treatments only. When you stop taking the medications, the neurotransmitter levels will become pathological once more and symptoms will re-appear.
-OddDuckNash99-