Is my fear for Medication justified?

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Hello,

I been having a lot of problems the last two years. Severe depression, insomnia, gender dysphoria, light OCD, body dysmorphic disorder, beginning anorexia, anger issues, high anxiety, trouble socializing and being fired for lack of it. explosive anger and rage when i hear certain sounds or words and probably some more things. Every once in a while my father says i should try out medication but i am always reluctant. I don't want some random junk in my system.

The thing i am most afraid of is, how will they choose the right medicine if they cannot pinpoint what is wrong with me. Sure i have alot of anxiety, but at certain times, i don't feel anxiety or depression and i don't want strange medicine in me. And the thing with the anger and impatience, i feel like my surroundings are mostly to blame aswell. I don't want to take medicine because some people are intolerable, and some sounds drive me crazy. I rather be rid of those things than embrace them with medicine.

In a way i also feel that these things are what i am. I don't want my feelings about Gender Identity to change, i don't want to be okay with accepting my weight because i know once you stop paying attention you gain alot of weight. Plus it also doesn't help to read on the internet that the kind of medication my doctor has suggested has a "chance to shorten lifespan". That's crazy. I also read of some that can make you fat. I'd rather die than take those. I don't want to know what other horrible things some of these medicine can do.

So what do i do? I admit i DO want to feel normal, and at peace but i don't want to risk it and i also feel like i'll have to try a lot of different kinds before i find the right one and the thought of trying more than one type of medicine is sickening to me. By the way i should mention i am not yet diagnosed but suspected to have Aspergers by a autism expert and my therapist.

People who have anxiety and depression (like myself) dont experience it all the time. You really have to try and be fine with yourself or go on a personal journey like im doing.Once you aare understanding of yourself i believe that you will have less anxiety depression etc, of course this wont be an overnight thing

I've been where you are. Medication does help, as long as you're not on too much and as long as you never go on any kind of benzo! I'm currently going through benzo withdrawals and it's...bad. But I found the other medications, when on the correct dosage, made it so much easier to cope.

Being on the right medication is a great thing. Being on the wrong medication is rough. If possible, get your prescriptions from a psychiatrist with experience working with people on the spectrum, because we can react to these sorts of medications differently.


After the various drugs they put me on in and after college, I wasn't sure I'd trust meds again. I react pretty badly to both SSRIs and MAOIs. But after my diagnosis, my psychiatrist prescribed me an ADHD med and riserdal, which turned out to be an amazing combination for me. I've not felt this little anxiety since I was a child.

I am accepting of myself but still searching who i am. You're right it does help a lot to know yourself. It's not sure yet if i am on the spectrum, but maybe with my diagnosis coming up soon the doctors can make a better decision. I'll remember to see what "benzos" are about. I am scared about being given the wrong medication and then being permanently messed up or something. Medication is not candy and i am sure that some of the things medication does is not good for your brain.

I hate pills too. But the thing i hate the most is the certainty that they are giving the right medication. In many cases you will become just an experiment in their hands. Anyway if i would feel very bad, i would accept medication without thinking too much.

Well, sometimes, even without a really precise diagnosis, medication can still help with your symptoms. For example, let's say you have a physical problem--let's say your back hurts, and your doctor can't figure out what's wrong with it. Well, he can still prescribe a painkiller to help with the pain; or maybe a muscle relaxant if the muscles in your back are cramping up. And maybe thanks to those medications you'll be able to go about your life more or less normally, and eventually your back might heal itself.

Psychiatrists can do much the same thing with people who have complicated cases. If you have depressive symptoms, traits of anxiety disorders, etc., there are medications that can help you. Psychologists and other therapists can teach you skills that can help improve mental health and help you deal with your problems, cope with stress, manage emotions, understand and improve relationships.

Mental illness is unique to each person. The diagnostic categories are rough, and not everybody fits into them perfectly. If you don't, that doesn't mean you can't get useful treatment. Define your problems precisely: What causes distress for you? What skills do you need to learn? What traps do you keep falling into, and need to learn how to avoid? What emotions overwhelm you? How do you want to change the way you interact with others and with the world around you?

It can be nice to say you have this disorder or that one, but really, you're still a unique person, and your own way of dealing with it is going to be at least slightly different from everybody else's, even the people with the same labels. If you have a dozen labels or none at all, maybe it's better to just focus on solving specific problems and generally making your life better.

To the OP: Most of the problems you mentioned respond to various anti-depressants to some degree or another. Clearly things effect people different and you hear a lot of horror stories. However there are a lot more people who are silently not posting about their horror stories because they're no longer depressed/anxious/OCD and frequenting mental health forums. I tick off at least 5-6 (basically all but the gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia) of the problems you listed. I think for me anti-depressants work to a degree. Some make some of my symptoms much worse while others help with them all a little or at least don't make the problems worse. For example, citalopram and escitalopram both made me more anxious and made my OCD worse but for most people have the exact opposite effect and are considered very effective for anxiety disorders. The drug I take now though, venlafaxine, makes everything a *little* better for me. It's not a major difference but it takes the edge off a little which is totally worth it. I also get very few side effects from the venlafaxine whereas for me the (es)citalopram had crazy side effects. But I know others who took them and were totally fine. I also really doubt that any drug is going to change your feelings about gender identity. It might make you more able to cope with any restrictions upon your gender identity which you feel are placed upon you. I could see why that would concern you though because gender identity is such an integral part of a person's being that the thought of it being messed with or altered in an unplanned way is quite terrifying; a you or a me with an altered gender identity is almost a totally different person and I don't like the idea of that either. But I think that is likely to be an unfounded worry.

Basically what I am getting at is that I would give the drugs a try if I were you. I know it's terrifying (I resisted taking any anti-depressants for ages) and it is, to a degree, a roll of the dice as to how a given drug is gonna effect you. But it's totally worth a go imo. They can make you feel a bit crazy for a while when you first start taking them but, the reality is, most people who take most anti-depressants derive some benefit from them with limited (in severity and often duration) and tolerable side effects. It could make a big difference to your quality of life and I know just how very unpleasant (some of) these things can make you feel. As far as them possibly shortening your life expectancy (and this is probably not hugely common/hugely significant) then constant high levels of anxiety and depression will also do that so it's worth the experiment for 6 months or a year out of your life in my opinion. I hate these trite sayings, I really do, but: nothing ventured, nothing gained. Despite being trite that one is very accurate.

I'm getting prescribed Ritalin for my NVLD. It's the first psych med I'll be taking since I was in like 8th grade with Celexa. I didn't like how Celexa made me feel, it just made me feel weird, I can't explain it, but I just didn't like the feeling on it. It also didn't seem to make me any happier or anything like that. But now I can kinda attribute that to the alexithymia that comes from ASD. I didn't even think I was "depressed" when they diagnosed me with depression, so yeah.

I couldn't do this as much as I'd have liked, as I don't have a job and my mother wouldn't really help me with it, but if you find some herbal things and vitamins you can take consistently (consistency is the key to all in life) and clean your diet up and exercise, that'll help things a lot. Try to eat everything that you eat by cooking it from scratch yourself using natural ingredients. Find some exercise you like doing. For supplements, start with a multivitamin and a few grams of fish oil a day. Extra supplemental magnesium helps, too, as most of us are magnesium deficient. One other thing you can try is an amino acid found in green tea called L-theanine, it's supposed to help for mood. For herbal supplements, I like ginseng and rhodiola rosea a lot, they're both pretty much stims, and rhodiola rosea as far as I can tell acts a bit like an SNRI (raises norephrine and epinephrine levels.) I also like astragalus and chrysanthemum tea.

I would tell you to look at things from the nutritional angle first. I view medications as basically being stopgaps. Obviously, the human body isn't deficient in drugs. It's deficient in nutrients. Give things the right nutrients and it can usually heal itself and return to a state of balance. Drugs can help by basically forcing things along, but it's a bit like using a sledge hammer to hang pictures sometimes. So what I'd tell you to do is, read up the best you can on nutrition, getting proper sleep, and start taking a good multivitamin and fish oil, and see what happens from that before going on meds, then if you can't feel better, then go on meds.

@Callista - Makes sense. I don't know what i would say then to a doctor about what really bothers me. Sometimes i go for days without feeling depressed while other days i feel hopeless. I would probably ask for something against anxiety as it is my number 1 foe.

@Invisiblesilent - I guess i could try out meds against anxiety but i can't live with side effects like gaining weight or "reduced life span". I once asked for medicine but my therapist said i could think it over and give a answer on the next appointment, she said i would have to take SSRIs with some number i can't remember what it was. But after researching that medicine i read stories about how it reduces life span and that put me off right away and only confirmed my suspicions that meds are bad and evil.

@1000Knives - Good idea maybe i should try things like Fish Oil. I am already a Green Tea lover and my favorite is Ginseng mixed with liquorice and lemon grass. I drink about 5 big cups of tea each day. And maybe i should pick up the habit again of taking multivitamin

Medication and I have a stormy relationship.

I seek help and take medication because I desperately want to feel "better". But I hate needing to take medication to feel "better" - because inside I don't feel like I deserve to feel any different than I do and also I am a bit angry that I can't figure out how to make myself feel "better" without medication - so I usually end up sabotaging myself by not taking the medication regularly or as directed or by overdosing. This usually happens just as the medication is starting to make a difference.

Consequently I am labelled as a non-compliant patient. This frustrates me because I don't mean to do this ... I always start medication with the best of intentions but then I screw up. I hate that I do it.

I get where you are coming from YellowBanana. The same goes for me. That's also part of why i am relucant, if the feeling is going to be there for a long time why not learn what to do about it and how to prevent it instead of taking the magic pill.

Wouldn't it help for you if you wrote down the things you have trouble with the most, then take your medicine and work on them? I think that's what they are for really to make you feel normal why you address the problems you couldn't think about before.

Well, my experience has been that a low dose of risperdal did nothing but make me hurt, a high dose of risperdal almost killed me (and dying would have been a mercy at that point), and 20 milligrams of Prozac and trying to accept that I am indeed not horribly broken have helped a lot.

Risperdal has helped quite a few people. I was not one of them. You might give the atypical antipsychotics a go-- just make sure you pull the plug on them fast if they don't work for you. If you're not working with someone who will support you in that, work with someone else.

I'm not normal (and if I can help it I never will be). I'm also not "all better." Whatever the hell those things are.

I'm not, yet, as healthy happy and high-functioning as I could be. We're working on it.

Environmental factors probably are part of your problems. Thet usually are.

Run-- do not walk, RUN-- from anyone who tries to "fix" your gender identity or tells you to accept being medicated into being a houseplant.

That said-- Your most critical problems, I think, are the developing anorexia, the anxiety, and the depression, in that order.

The developing anorexia is an immediate threat to your life. Period. You can fix fat. You can fix anxiety and depression. You can learn to turn Asperger's into more of an asset than a liability. You can't fix dead-- and anorexia will kill you. All by itself.

Deal with that first. Then the D&A. That should help you cope with the situation. Asperger's?? Been my experience that you have to love your Aspie self before you can change it (I'll let you know if that works), so don't sweat that one rtight now.

I'm not too sure if i really am in a starting phase of Anorexia. I mean i'm about 3 kilos away from being underweight but i still think i'm a bit fat and i am definitely obsessive about food. My family tells me i look super skinny with my ribcage showing and stuff but i don't see it that way. I guess that's body dysmorphic disorder. Mostly i eat normal but i am trying to limit what i eat more and more. And then at times i just eat at other times than midday meal and supper but i feel bad when i do.

Meds aren't as horrible if they give you an improved quality of health. I take them for my ADHD and one of them helps the anxiety that goes with AS. I have a better quality of life because of it.