Sigh. This again? I’ve written before about documentaries that stigmatize psychiatric medications (A Prescription For Murder and The Age of Anxety). Now Netflix has released Take Your Pills, which looks at the use of stimulant medications for mental performance enhancement. I started watching this documentary and gave up in disgust. But after I read a …
Do antidepressants work? There’s a lot of stigma around psychiatric medications, and plenty of people would argue that no, antidepressants don’t work. There are also people, that argue that medication is life-saving. Those are personal experiences, but what does the research have to say? A recent paper published in the Lancet, and reported on in …
The Psych Meds 101 series on my perspective as a mental health nurse, former pharmacist, and person with depression. This final post in the series focuses on sleep meds. While some of these meds are primarily for sleep, many have other uses as well. The choice of medication for any given person will be based …
Birth of a New Brain chronicles author Dyane Harwood’s journey with postpartum onset bipolar disorder. The story’s rich, vivid descriptions draw the reader along on the intense roller coaster ride of the author’s illness experience. Many elements of her story will be hauntingly familiar to those whose lives have been touched in some way by bipolar …
It can be really useful to understand how medications work, as it can make both the therapeutic effects and side effects make more sense. As a mental health nurse, former pharmacist, and psych med-taker, this is a major area of interest for me. This is the first of a series of psych meds 101 posts …
What do mental illness and sex have to do with each other? Quite a bit, actually, both in terms of the illness itself and the medications to treat it.
Society is obsessed with how we look, and in particular what size we are. Even people who are generally quite polite feel entitled to comment on our weight and body shape, without having any idea what the backstory might be. In the case of mental illness, there is often a great deal of backstory.
