medication

Medication

I heard a quote yesterday which starts this blog post of perfectly;

‘for every person that says their life has been ruined by psychiatric medication, there’s one person that says it has saved them’

And I don’t think I could’ve put it better myself. Ill put a disclaimer here, this is obviously my own experience. There have been some awful experiences, but also times when medication has saved my life. Currently, medication is 80% responsible for keeping me well enough to stay out of hospital (the other 20% being my weekly trips to my therapist, dietician, social worker and all of the other support teams that I can talk to day and night).

I was first put on medication when I was 14 years old. It made no difference, in fact it probably made me worse. At the time, my anorexia was controlling me, my mood was so low I was self harming every day, having intrusive suicidal thoughts, and had compelling obsessive compulsive rituals that would keep me up for hours every night. They tried two types of anti depressant, with no effect, and then made me worse. At that age, in the experience then, I thought psychiatric medication was utterly useless.

Fast-forward to 17 year old Fiona. I was in an awful place, in and out of A&E multiple times a week, my thoughts were out of control, I was loosing touch with reality completely. I was sectioned to a paediatric psychiatric unit. The first night I remember vividly; crying and crying until my head hurt and I had nothing left to give. The nurses came into my room with a little blue pill in a cup and ushered me to take it. I did, and progressed to fall asleep. This is my next experience of psychiatric medication, which I can wholeheartedly say traumatised me.

In this unit, I had no say in my care. I was moved to a high dependency bay due to how unwell I was, how risky, unpredictable and the amount of staff intervention I required. The psychiatrist I was under was ‘pro-medication’. I didn’t understand what this meant until a few years later. See, I vividly remember my first night there… but the next 7 months I spent on that ward? Next to nothing. Anti-psychotics were started on my second day there, I vaguely recollect them helping to start with. Things started making more sense again. And then… I was just tired. My dose was increased, and increased, and increased. My distress levels matched my dosage… the more they went up, the more time I spent asleep, and when I woke up again I felt such distress with confusion with what was happening that I would panic and have an incident. This resulted in more medication. There’s no choice when you’re under section, either you take the pills in the pot 4 times a day, or you have a team of people pin you to a bed and an injection in your bum. Writing this now, I cant help but feel angry for my younger self. I was too drugged out to form a legible sentence to even talk about what was going on in my head. ‘pro-medication’ in this ward meant ‘medication is the answer for everything’. Pills pills pills. I started pretending to take them and secretly shoved them down my sleeve. This only resulted in liquid medication, an increased dose and another type of medication added to my chart.

The next medication I was started on was only supposed to be used in older women. The dose was tripled in a week, along with the regime of other drugs. I was now on the maximum dose of all I was on. Refusal? Injection. You take your meds, You sleep for 22 hours a day. You don’t have to be a Brainiac to realise that that’s not going to get anyone better. Visits from my family would consist of me sleeping, struggling to keep my eyes open. Or panicking, getting distressed, getting more distressed as I felt unable to explain what was happening. My parents didn’t know, they weren’t told about the meds I was on. All they knew is their bubbly Fiona was long gone, what had replaced was an empty, tired, numb, scared Fiona. I’m not saying the medication was wholly to answer for this, I was still very unwell and although my symptoms had decreased to a degree… they had just been replaced with the effects of the drugs. The side effects to these medications were awful. I gained a significant amount of weight which triggered my anorexia badly. I had a tremor in my hands, my whole body twitched which means another medication was added to counterbalance the side effects. I felt woozy the whole time, spaced out and not real. I slept for hours and hours each day; and considering I used to be a sprightly, energetic teenager… it was very hard to cope with.

I was transferred from that ward in a horrific way, but had hoped the change in psychiatrist would mean a tweak to the drugs that had stolen my personality. No such luck. My new psychiatrist didn’t even listen when I spoke. Three months down the line, I had lied my way into being discharged. That’s a whole other story. Now I was at home, with this terrible drug regime, no better than when I was first admitted for hospital. You could probably guess what happened next. I stopped taking them. The next two months are an equal blur. A week of complete mania, I wasn’t sleeping, I suddenly had all this energy and I went from task to task to task and didn’t stop. And then the thoughts started again, it all spun into a confusing mess. Reality was slipping out of my touch again, but much worse this time. Then the crash. I ended up back in hospital a few times, eventually in a psychiatric day hospital.

They were better there. they listened and adjusted my dose to what I consider high but acceptable. It lasted a month. The next 6 months I bounced from taking meds, to stopping them because I hated them, to hitting rock bottom and start taking them again. I had such an unhealthy understanding and relationship with them… I thought they were bad, absolutely awful. But a small part of me also knew that they were what kept my head level and me out of hospital. This made rational sense when I could think, but the too’ing and fro’ing of starting-stopping starting stopping made me very unstable. I couldn’t keep a rational thought of reality long enough to take medication at a therapeutic level.

A quick note here – ‘therapeutic dose’ is described as enabling a patient to live at a basic level, but the awareness that other methods of treatment will be needed to resolve an illness. Aka my anti psychotics meant my symptoms were reduced to the point I could keep a handle on reality and keep things stable, but I needed therapy alongside to understand and therefore start working on what was happening in my head.

I’ve felt medication at the other end of the spectrum too. A psychiatrist that was particularly anti-medication. I was kept on very low doses and given a lot more therapy to try to help counterbalance it. I’m not saying this approach didn’t work, but it only helped when I was in hospital. Hospital provides a clear structure; it is regimented and everything is predictable. That’s why so many people tend to stabilise in hospital – less about the drugs, more about the situation they’re in is a safe place, which usually calms someone’s head down. However, the moment I was transferred, and my circumstances changed so drastically, everything started to fall apart again. My dose was tripled, and new medications added. I remember being terrified. Medication does terrify me, and if you understand how bad my experience of it has been… you’ll know why. This time, the consultant did listen, and we found a new therapeutic dose that has kept me out of hospital for nearly a year.

Now? I see my new psychiatric regularly. I’ve recently been starting on a new type of medication which has massively helped me. I’m allowed to adjust the dose of my meds in relation to how I’m doing. For example; if I notice an increase in symptoms, I increase my dose. If they dissipate without intervention and I feel able to decrease, I do. The trust and control I have now is slowly repairing my relationship with those little pills. I still take medication twice a day. In bad weeks, that increases. I will be on medication for probably the rest of my life; I’ve come to accept that. They keep me out of hospital and safe.

I refer back to the quote at the beginning,

‘for every person that says their life has been ruined by psychiatric medication, there’s one person that says it has saved them’

Psychiatric drugs have both pushed me to resenting my life, myself and the world… but they have also saved me. I wouldn’t be alive without them. I wouldn’t be at home and functioning without them. I’ve witnessed friends go through similar situations; where medication is played around with for months on end and that in itself can be tormenting. Your brain chemicals out of balance kind of affects your whole life. Trial and error process of medication is long and tiresome. It took me years to find the correct type and level for me.

The stigma around psychiatric medication has on occasions, been the reason I stopped taking them. ‘you’ve changed’ – someone I was very close to. I felt ashamed, angry and confused. I had no choice but to take these pills that I knew were changing me. I couldn’t think properly because of the fog in my brain; which panicked me. I felt like I was losing myself, and I felt like the people I loved would give up on me, or find me boring. The reality of the situation was if I didn’t take those pills, I would get so unwell id end up back in hospital. But if I did, I lived this half life existence and feared people would walk away.

Here’s the crux; medication for mental illness is exactly like a diabetic taking insulin, or someone with anaemia taking iron supplements. There’s an imbalance of chemicals in your brain and medication helps to balance it out. There should be absolutely no stigma around it. Medication works for some people, and not for others. For me personally, it has saved my life and given me to ability to function, to engage in therapy and treatment, and I’m complacent with it now. If you know someone going through medication changes, be there for them. It can be terrifying taking a pill that you know is going to affect your brain – and having no idea how its going to do so. You don’t know the side effects until you try it. Lesser effects such as drowsiness, sickness, headaches etc; or much more concerning ones like psychotic episodes, suicide attempts etc. It’s a very scary time.

Medication isn’t weak. For some, its what helps make them strong. There is, of course, other ways of treating someone. But medication can allow someone to get to a level to engage in the other treatments.

Never be ashamed.

Fi x