If some particularly controlling parents knew psychiatric medications were likely to have certain side effects, might they purposely inflict such treatment on their children as a way of controlling some of their offspring’s more unruly tendencies? Like, say, their kids’ rampant youthful sexuality?

That was the dystopian scenario some readers posed in response to my last blog post about psychiatric medications and sexual side effects.

I have to admit, it struck me as perhaps a little far-fetched that parents would put their children on medications solely for the side effects.

But, still, I wondered: If given a choice between two similar drugs, one with such side effects and one without, might a nervous parent not gravitate toward the medication that would quell their fears about burgeoning teenage sexuality?

Pediatrician and author Claudia Gold recently published a column about my book, Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up, over at The Boston Globe in which she highlighted an issue I’ve been meaning to address here for some time: Young people and medications’ sexual side effects.

The drugs most famous for interfering in the sexual realm are the SSRI antidepressants, like Prozac and Zoloft, which can cause loss of libido and problems with sexual arousal and orgasm. But mood stabilizers, such as Tegretol and Depakote, which are commonly used to treat bipolar disorder, also cause sexual side effects for many people

Both classes of drugs have been increasingly used in young people over the past couple of decades. But if these young people experience sexual side effects from the medications, what are the effects on their psychosexual development? Should we be worried?

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.

This reader’s story about her experience with medication seems especially timely, given the recent analysis of studies analyzing suicidal ideation and antidepressants. She says she experienced such suicidal thoughts in the initial weeks of treatment, but that the thoughts passed.

For patients, especially young people, who do experience this kind of suicidal ideation after beginning an antidepressant, it is usually early in the course of treatment. The reader, who didn’t want to use her name, doesn’t elaborate on her response to this suicidal ideation, or whether a doctor told her to expect it.

However, if she’d be willing to take questions in the comments section, I, for one, would be very curious to hear more about how she interpreted these thoughts, whether they scared her, whether she was able to brush them off because she knew they were “drug-induced,” etc.

I’d also like to hear why she was so resistant to taking meds in the first place and whether there was going on in her life that was particularly stressful and that she thinks helped set off her depression at that particular time.

Her initial resistance is interesting to me, because it seemed to surface again during the time she she either forgot to take her medications or decided to go off it and concluded that she “deserved” her misery. From interviews I’ve conducted and research I’ve done, that seems a very common attitude in others, especially in depressives. I don’t think it’s necessarily unique to being young, but I would be curious to hear readers’ thoughts about why this mindset is so persistent.

Incidentally, on the topic of suicidal ideation, I’d like to point readers to a very thoughtful critique of the Archives of General Psychiatry study by Dr. David Healy, a psychopharmacologist and one of the most prominent and earliest crusaders seeking to draw attention to the link between antidepressants and suicidal behaviors and thoughts. I’m not sure I understand everything he says in the column, but it’s an interesting read, nonetheless.

And now, the reader’s account of her experience with meds, in her own words. I invite further personal stories about medication, in any format you like and on any aspect of your experience – don’t feel bound by the prompts I gave. Email me at kaitlin.b.barnett [at] gmail.com. Try to include your diagnoses and what medications you took.

A reader, whom I’ll call ES, has generously provided the following account of her experience with antipsychotic drugs, starting when she was 13. I think she provides a very nuanced perspective.

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?

Once you start following the debate about young people and psychotropic drugs, you see the word “overmedicated” bandied around a lot.

I’ve argued before that deeming kids overmedicated without saying what constitutes properly medicated doesn’t make a lot of sense. Still, at least we have some idea of approximately what percentage of kids in the United States – and, to a lesser extent, in other countries – take various kinds of psychiatric meds. What we don’t know is how long the kids continue to take these medications.

This is a frustrating knowledge gap if, like me, you’re interested in the long-term “psychosocial” effects of taking meds – that is, how the experience shapes kids’ outlooks and identities.

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.