Medication is my lifeline to stability for bipolar disorder. Having found a medication that works for me, I have become accustomed to the idea of long-term use.
While in the past I equated medication with illness, I began to reinvent myself by equating it with health. As long as I stay on meds, I have no episodes, no life disruptions. I have become an advocate of long-term medication to such a degree that in the past, when my psychiatrist brought up reducing the dosage or weaning me off, I implored him to keep me on.
In the mid 1980’s, this was counter to the standard of psychiatry. Long-term medication with psychiatric drugs was frowned upon due to the chance of side effects that consisted of irreversible muscle and lip movement. I decided I could live with this possibility if it would fend off the near-certainty of another episode of delusional mania, which would make a shambles of my life.
The doctors were reticent but obliged me in my steadfast opposition to discontinue. This has turned out to be a good decision, an integral part of my playing “catch up.” Saying goodbye to psychotic mania in favor of recovery is my prescription for having a life.
It is easy to understand the initial negativity a patient has toward medication. Quite often it doesn’t feel good. In fact, sometimes it feels awful. The argument that the cure is worse than the illness is not a just response. Timing and temperance play a role in recovery as do the multiple medications we have to choose from today. Though one medication may bring side effects, to live in a crazed world where there are no boundaries between fact and fiction is by far worse, and one which has no alternative. The symptoms of the illness are worse than the side effects of the meds.
We, today, don’t know it, but we are blessed. A short 40 or 50 years ago, there were no antipsychotic drugs as we know them today. Recovery as a concept didn’t exist. Again, we are blessed to live in the era we do.
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