On this blog and in my new book, Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up, I explore young people’s experiences with medication. And oftentimes, by exposing their ambivalence, even their resentment, toward their treatment from an early age, I end up implicitly questioning the value of early intervention for mental illness.

So in honor of the American Psychological Association’s Mental Health Month Blog Party Day, I want to address the question of whether I think early intervention is worth it.

In this blog, I have been writing about different facets of “the experience of medication” in young people who take psychiatric drugs for a variety of conditions.

I’m going to continue to do that, because there are many more topics I want to discuss (please feel free, as always, to make suggestions in the comments section if there are particular subjects you’d like me to write about).

However, if you’d like to read an account of what got me interested in this subject in the first place, you might want to check out the excerpt from my new book, Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up, which is over at Salon.com.

In my last post I blogged about the decision whether or not to disclose to a significant other that you are taking medication. For this post, I said I would write about when both members of a couple are taking meds – but when one is an old hand and one is a relative newbie.

To my knowledge, there are no studies explicitly looking at this topic, but I think it would certainly make for an interesting line of research to look at the differing effects on identity. If I were a researcher, the central question I’d ask would be: Do people who begin taking meds at younger age feel that the drugs are more integral to their sense of self than those who begin them when their identities are already fully formed?

A reader’s story about taking meds has spurred me to address a topic I’ve been mulling about for some time now: the ways in which people do or don’t discuss their medications with their significant others.

The reader, a 21-year-old who wanted to go only by “CJ” was plagued by several concerns about taking medication long-term. Among them was the possibility of “meeting someone” and then needing to disclose having a psychiatric diagnosis and a regimen of psychopharmaceuticals, without which, CJ, said “I’m a different person, a scary person.”

I found it sad and poignant that this was among this young person’s top concerns concerning medication. But for better or worse, taking psychiatric medication is a very private act, something we must decide whether or not to disclose to others.

The decision to do so or not to do so takes on outsize importance as young people navigate their first serious relationships.

I try to keep up with books and movies that deal with young people and medications, even as minor theme. To that end, I just finished reading and watching the movie version of Ned Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story, about an overachieving, depressed and very stressed-out teenager named Craig who checks himself into a psychiatric ward after quitting  Zoloft.

During his stay, Craig restarts his medication, and, more importantly to the larger message of the story, finds some much-needed inner peace.

The book takes a vaguely pro-medication stance (don’t stop taking your meds cold turkey or you might end up in a psychiatric hospital), but it got me thinking about a couple of more interesting questions along the way: Can people who have never experienced serious psychiatric problems understand those who have? And, by extension, can those who have never taken psychiatric medication understand what it is like to take one?

I tweeted earlier this week that I can’t get the PBS documentary Boy Interrupted out of my head, and that’s still true several days and a second viewing later.

Creative Commons License image credit: mnapoleon/Flickr

The documentary retraces the life, psychiatric illness and eventual suicide of Evan Perry, medicated from age 7 and diagnosed with bipolar disorder age 10. At 15, Evan killed himself by jumping out the window of the bedroom he shared with his little brother. He had been stabilized on lithium for years, but tapered off the drug a few months before he died.

The film represents an attempt of Evan Perry’s filmmaker parents to fathom the unfathomable – why their son decided, finally, to take his own life.

What does it feel like to grow up taking psychiatric meds? That’s the question that has occupied me for the past couple of years. Naturally, it feels different to different people, but overall I’ve found that meds seem to introduce a lot of extra uncertainty into the process of coming of age.

There are a lot of ways that meds make growing up more complicated, and I’ll explore those in future posts. But one big factor has to do with the lack of info, from a scientific perspective, about meds’ effect on developing brains and bodies.