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Prescription Cascade with psychiatric drugs is out of control. Seen it first hand. Had to step in and put a lot of pressure on doctors (and change doctors) to finally get my finance off the worst of the meds they had her on -- and finally "cure" her -- they just wanted to keep playing new drug musical chairs.
This terrifies me. I've been trying to get up the nerve to talk to my doctor about my mental health for years now. I've been depressed on and off for a large portion of my life. I've always been really wary of pills though and reading things like this makes me worry even more. I wonder if the efficacy is actually there or if the withdrawal is worth it.
I had suffered a reaction to an antibiotic, it is now documented by case studies, FDA, and EMA. I still have some side effects years after last dosage. I have seen maybe 30 docs over the years, ONLY ONE agreed that my symptoms appear to be a direct reaction to that medication. Few refused I even after I showed that information. Said "it doesn't really matter at this point"....
Imagine this: You know arrays start at 0 in C#/Java even though you don't program but you saw a meme online. Now, you want to have an application developed. During the first conversation with a dev he says, ah "no problem we can use arrays and those start 1".......This has been my experience, the amount of doctors that just are ignorant, relying on knowledge from 80's when they attended school is saddening. Entering the medical system has been eye opening for me, I feel that developers could do a better job treating people with just google (obviously surgery is different, I am talking mainly about prescriptions)
Fast forward a couple years and I'm realizing that medications aren't the answer for me. So what do my doctors do? They try to push yet another pill or three down my throat. Finally I'd had enough of it and told them I didn't want to take anything anymore. Their idea of a tapering plan from over 2 years of medications was a week and a half. They were sure to tell me that if I stopped treatment I wouldn't be given any more refills and one doctor condemned me for even showing up to my appointment with the intention of discontinuing medications. He said I was wasting everyones time.
Anyway, I figured sure, I got this. I can get myself off these meds. I was very wrong. I made it about two weeks before withdrawals really kicked into overdrive. Dizzy, brain zaps, tinnitus, profuse sweating all hours of the day, insomnia, numbness in my face and arms, racing heart, involuntary muscle spasms... I started stuttering and couldn't force my body to stop twitching and shaking. My mind was completely fogged over and at times I couldn't even articulate words to talk to someone. It was a state of being in a perpetual panic attack multiplied by 100. After I thought I was actually going to die I setup an emergency appointment to try and get a prescription refill and a longer tapering plan only my doctors wouldn't have it. They flat out refused treatment and told me to go to the ER if I thought things were getting that bad. I was floored. Here this doctor got me physically addicted to powerful mind altering medications over the course of a couple years and now that I want out they treated me like a drug addict and dismissed me.
In the end I sourced some darknet meds and very slowly tapered myself down. To this day I'm still not even close to being back to normal, whatever that is. I get random panic attacks out of the blue on a daily basis. Sometimes the left side of my body will go numb. Other times I'll just start sweating while my heart beats like I just finished running a marathon. The ringing in my ears is horrible. I'm now extremely sensitive to stimulants of any kind (no more caffeine, meh) so I've had to make some significant changes to my diet.
The good news is I've been 100% off any medications for two months now and I'm finally getting to where I can get more than four consecutive hours of sleep several days a week (so much better than zero sleep every day). I feel as though being able to enjoy coffee, sugary drinks, and having the ability to actually sleep an entire night has been permanently removed from my life now.
At any rate, if there's anything anyone should get from all this rambling, it's that you should exercise extreme caution with pill pushing doctors. They have the ability to drag you into your worst nightmare of existence and leave you high & dry when you want the ride to stop.
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> Medication cannot make people happy. But it can allow one to find happiness. Depression is a chemical imbalance, and not everyone can overcome it on their own - especially if left untreated for extended lengths of time. The medicine helps people get back into balance, so they can start to work on their happiness again, whatever that may be.
Literally the next sentence I wrote: > They can only create the possibility for happiness for those who need some extra help.
I generally am supportive of people seeking psychiatric treatment, but wow, this woman's case seems, in retrospect, rather mismanaged. It is like her doctors tried to medicate away an epiphany. Realizing that "the glittering balls and designer clothing has no real underlying substance" and being depressed that one's life is limited to such things, is not a cause for medication. It sounds like she was struggling to be…
Psychiatry should not be front-line treatment for most people. End of story.
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Therapy is also a long lasting, lucrative approach. I think you're confusing consumerism with the long standing idea that we should be able to solve everything with a pill. It's evident in the older generations insistence that if they could just have that one surgery for their knees, or that round of antibiotics for their cold, their lives would be 100% better.
Consumerism: the protection or promotion of the interests of consumers I think there are very definitely market forces at work, keeping people in the mindset that pharmaceuticals are the only 'real' effective solution to their ills - when so, so many other alternatives are available. I don't doubt that chemicals can make peoples lives happier - I see it all the time. What I resist, however, is the notion that individ…
What I'm getting from this is you have a specific agenda against "group think and collective-derived thought processes" and are being purposefully vague, as demonstrated with "...".
What is your alternative? You seem to have one in mind.
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Any idea what triggered the insomnia?
This is the most important question here. I hope OP has been able to address the original cause of the insomnia, lest it happen again.
Once you have insomnia for a few weeks it tends to be self-reinforcing. I didn't get adequate medical care during the first few weeks, when it was acute, so it became chronic. I tried, but the doctor wrote me a half-strength prescription for Ambien, and that was all. It didn't work.
I am on Klonopin and Remeron. My diagnosis is anxiety, but really it's insomnia. I had a horrible, multiple-year episode of insomnia that started in my early thirties. For about three years I got maybe one night a week of decent sleep. I was mentally and emotionally out of it; I'm kind of surprised I still have a job after that. A few years in, I found a psychiatrist who was willing to experiment and we discovered th…
>Knowing that I have medications available to me that can help me get to sleep is enough that I think I don't actually need the medications any more. Honest question: Have you ever considered that your insomnia was psychosomatic and , through your doctors involvement in for-profit sales of pharmaceuticals, socially re-inforced?
In my case, I see my psychiatrist once a quarter for fifteen minutes. Klonopin and Remeron are two of the cheapest drugs there are. My meds cost me less than $40 a year. I don't think anyone is making a lot of money off of me.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or biofeedback, which are two alternatives that were presented to me, would have been far more expensive.