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.

I just wrote a book arguing that taking psychiatric medication from a young age has a profound effect on people’s lives and identities, far more profound than most – including those who take the medications in question – even realize.

But sometimes it’s possible to go too far with this view, to see everything through the prism of mental illness and medication. It’s can be unfair, even dangerous, to assume that just because someone has a history of psychiatric problems and medication use, that that’s the cause of their present problems.

I was reminded of this myself over the weekend.

I stayed up late the last few nights reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, engrossed in large part by the subplot involving Leonard Bankhead, who suffers from bipolar disorder and what might be called a typically complicated relationship with both his manic phases and his medication.

The book is set in the early 1980s, which gives Leonard few viable options for pharmaceutical treatment. Now doctors often prescribe anticonvulsants such as Tegretol and Depakote, and atypical antipsychotics, but back then lithium was more or less the only choice.

Leonard began to experience depressions early in high school but wasn’t diagnosed or treated until his freshman year of college, when he began taking a low dose of lithium apparently without incident.

But as college graduation nears, he begins to chafe at the idea of taking the medication at all, which sets him on a terrible merry-go-round of breakdowns, high doses to get him back on track, side effects from the high doses and then rebellions against the side effects, followed by more breakdowns.

This is a blog about young people’s experiences with medications, and I’m always looking to broaden the scope of stories I tell.

I’ve really appreciated people sharing their personal experiences in the comments section, but if anyone would like to elaborate in a guest post, or by getting in touch with me and then having me write up a short account of their experience, please get in touch in the comments section and we can go from there.

Full names aren’t necessary for those concerned about confidentiality.

I am particularly interested in hearing from those who began taking medication as children or teens. You can highlight any aspect of the experience that stands out to you, but here are a few ideas to get you thinking. You don’t have to address all of them!

1) How did you start taking medication in the first place? At the time, did you think you needed medication?

In my last post, I asked what it means for your “illness identity” when you take a medication that manages your psychiatric problems so that they go away or are no longer problematic. “Does a formerly “severe” mental illness become “mild” or “moderate”?” I asked “Does it disappear entirely?”

It’s often said that these disorders can’t be cured – they can just be managed. Medications are one way of managing them. But the fact is, few people like taking psychiatric drugs. They have unpleasant side effects, they get us deemed “weak” or make us feel like we’re leaning on a crutch, they even change our identity and sense of self.

Therefore, we need a reason to keep taking what we’ve been prescribed. A diagnosis and, more specifically, the presence of troubling symptoms, serve as the justification. The irony, though, is that once these troubling symptoms go away, it’s hard to see why the drugs are still warranted.

When the federal government released an important compendium of mental health data this week, the headlines proclaimed that 1 in 5 Americans over 18 had a diagnosable mental illness in the past year, and 1 in 20 had a “serious mental illness.”

But what does “serious mental illness” mean, anyway, and what are its connotations and implications when it comes to treatment? It’s a question worth asking, because it’s used differently in different contexts.