How to Deal with Mail Order Prescription Delays
Maggie asks…
I’ve messed up my meds by going cold turkey due to difficulties with insurance and lack of funds. Now I have to wait for the mail order prescription and I have not had any lithium for a month. This week I started noticing some of my early signs of my hypomania returning. Tonight, I’m not sleeping.
I don’t have a psychiatrist right now since my insurance wouldn’t cover his $300 office visits. I’ve just started with a new primary MD.
What are my options until I get the meds and get them to a therapeutic level? I really want to sleep! I start struggling with anxiety, agitation, and irritability that can escalate to rage. I’m more than a little nervous at this stage. Can you advise?
Dr. Fink answers…
Your best option at this point may be to contact your primary care physician and explain your situation. Your doctor may be able to provide you with samples or a short-term prescription you can have filled at your local pharmacy to carry you through until your mail-order prescription arrives along with something for the short term to help you sleep.



I’m currently co-facilitating a NAMI Family-to-Family course. Class 6 is all about medications and includes a very important section on medication adherence. In the class, we discussed the various reasons, many of which are valid, that people with brain disorders stop taking their medications.
Recently, a patient’s mom asked me why I was prescribing an antidepressant, fluoxetine (the generic form of Prozac), for her son’s anxiety disorder. Jeremy had started on this medication in the past few weeks. When I first prescribed it, I carefully outlined the target symptom of anxiety and explained how the medicine would help treat the anxiety through the serotonin system.
In a recent article published in Current Psychiatry Online, entitled “
I just read an article on the FOX News website entitled, “
If you’re taking a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (an SSRI antidepressant) that doesn’t seem to be working very well and you take nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), such as ibuprofen, to relieve pain, that NSAID may be the reason why your SSRI isn’t working.
