A safe place to talk openly about mental health & illness
The idea for this post came from Angela of I Am My Own Island, and others have also expressed interest in her suggestion. It's taken me a while to pull this post together because there just isn't a simple answer as to why psych medications stop working out of the blue sometimes. There are various… Continue reading Why Do Psych Medications Stop Working Sometimes?
If you take medication, or even if you haven't, you may have heard of the term half-life. But what does it actually mean? The idea for this post came from Angela of I Am My Own Island. Pharmacokinetics Half-life has to do with pharmacokinetics, which refers to the way a drug moves through the body.… Continue reading Medication Half-Life: What it Means and Why it Matters
Anyone can have nightmares, but up to 80% of people with PTSD experience nightmares as a symptom of their PTSD. The idea for this came from an article that SkinnyHobbit shared about the treatment of nightmares, which is based on recommendations from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine in 2018. What can worsen nightmares Some… Continue reading Medications That Can Help with Nightmares in PTSD
This post is based on an article that Skinny Hobbit shared with me. It was published last year in The Lancet Psychiatry and compared the potential for weight gain with different antipsychotics. The link between antipsychotics and weight gain To start, let's talk about why antipsychotics can cause weight gain. There are multiple different neurotransmitter… Continue reading Antipsychotics and the Likelihood of Weight Gain
Have you ever wondered why antidepressant side effects seem to be worse at the beginning, or why it takes so long for them to actually start doing what you expect of them? There is actually some rhyme and reason for it, so let's talk about it. Let's talk serotonin People with depression don't have enough… Continue reading Antidepressant Side Effects & Delayed Therapeutic Effect
There’s a lot of stigma around taking psych meds to treat mental illness. Meds certainly aren’t right for every person or every condition, but they're a good tool to have available as part of the mental illness toolbox. For all the social kerfuffle over meds, they are just a tool. Getting well (or getting by)… Continue reading Taking Psych Meds: I’ll Tell You Mine if You Tell Me Yours
You can find all kinds of stories online of people reporting negative experiences with different forms of psychiatric medication. However, there's inherent bias in that kind of reporting of side effects, so you really can't use that information to effectively generalize how safe or effective a treatment is. In this post, we'll look at where… Continue reading Bias in Online Stories of Psych Med Side Effects
But Deliver Me From Crazy by Katie R. Dale is a memoir of living with bipolar disorder. You may know Katie from her blog, and she also contributed a story about bipolar I to my book Making Sense of Psychiatric Diagnosis. The book begins when Katie was in high school, when her illness first appears.… Continue reading Book Review: But Deliver Me From Crazy
For anyone who needs to take medications for a chronic condition like mental illness, dealing with side effects may end up being part of the reality of taking meds. The pros should always be outweighing the cons, but the right balance can be hard to find. No side effects is possible All medications have potential… Continue reading Living with Psych Med Side Effects
Pretty much the same cocktail of meds I'm on now used to work well, and got me into full remission (i.e. no symptoms at all between episodes). I'm not sure what got me thinking about this recently, but while my depression has become increasingly treatment-resistant overall, my medications are still doing a pretty good job… Continue reading Treatment-Resistant Depression: What My Meds Do Help With