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.

A little while back, I asked readers to share their experiences with medication. CJ, who first took medication at age 12 and is now 21, was kind enough to write in. At 12, CJ had self-harmed and was suicidal, which was the initial impetus for drug treatment.

Some medications have helped with those tendencies, some only exacerbated them – a controversial topic I’ve addressed in previous posts.

Eight years later, mood swings and sleep continue to be problematic, and antidepressant and antipsychotic medications that help with these issues are ones CJ considers to work. Forgetting the drugs for even a day has alarming results, and CJ sees medication as necessary for living a “normal” life.

Despite reservations about lifelong medication treatment, CJ fears that doctors will think the medications have cured the disorders and stop drug therapy, triggering a frightening breakdown. Another lingering worry – and one I found particularly poignant – concerns meeting someone and falling in love, only to have the person leave upon finding out about CJ’s diagnoses and medications. Even with a team of doctors, therapists and other mental health professionals and a cocktail of medications, this young person sees a long road ahead to recovery and many obstacles ahead.

If you would like to share any aspect of your experience taking medication from a young age, please feel free to email me at kaitlin.b.barnett [@] gmail.com. And now, in CJ’s words:

I borrowed the title for today’s post from Is It Me Or My Meds?, a very interesting book by the sociologist David Karp that examines how people taking antidepressants understand the drugs’ impact on different aspects of their identity.

I keep coming back to this question with regard to a new medication I’m taking and some rather unpleasant and difficult-to-place cognitive effects I’ve been experiencing.

Karp’s book asks the question broadly, invoking it in big, existential ways and also with regard to smaller, more prosaic topics such as side effects. This second point is actually more fraught than it might seem: It can be amazingly difficult to tell drug side effects from psychiatric symptoms, something I’ve been reminded of lately as I’ve had my meds adjusted.

My whole medication regimen has been in flux lately, because, as I think I mentioned in a previous post, I’m trying to get my migraines under control and the drugs used to treat migraines can interact with those used to treat anxiety and depression.

Lately, I’ve been feeling anxious, jumpy, and have been having trouble concentrating. But it took me a while to even think to tie this to my medications.

Given how long I’ve been taking meds (more than a decade), and the fact that I’ve written a book about the complicated and unexpected effects of psychiatric medications, you’d think I’d know better. But it just goes to show that one is inclined to think one’s moods are organic or innate. It takes a bit before you think to ask if it’s the drugs you’re taking.

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.

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.

It seems like a fitting bookend to follow my last post, which discussed a documentary about a teen who killed himself a few months after he went off his mood stabilizers, with one about a documentary suggesting that meds – not the lack of them – are to blame for suicidal thoughts and actions.

The film Prescription: Suicide?, which a medication-critical reader was kind enough to send me, profiles families whose children killed themselves or experienced suicidal thoughts after they began taking SSRI antidepressants.

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.

Limbs like lead. Blurry vision. Suddenly ravenous. Then, without having eaten, nauseous.

I’m repeatedly mystified by the symptoms – even though they occur multiple times a week, and even though, without fail, they end in a migraine.  So how can I be so dumb as to forget, or even flat-out deny, the most likely explanation for what’s going on?

Improbable as it sounds, it’s really, really easy to misinterpret or dismiss symptoms, even of a condition you’ve experienced over and over. Until I learned to be more aware of the early stages of my anxiety, I tended to do the same. I’d forget or deny what was going on until the panic became ever-present, and too awful to ignore. Then I’d curse myself for not having recognized it earlier.