60 mg Cymbalta BID.
100 mg Seroquel qHS.
50 mg Lamictal qD.
In English, this means I take a total of 270 mg of various psychotropic drugs every 24 hours. Every month I ingest roughly $1,000 worth of man made chemicals. My body swallows them, metabolizes them, and excretes the waste.
Somewhere in chain of events a miracle happens: those man made psychotropic substances fix a glitch in my brain. It’s not a perfect fix, but it is a significant fix. The fix is significant enough that I am able to get up each morning, go to work, do a good job, come home, and go to bed. That shouldn’t sound like a lot to someone who has never battled the foe of depression, but to someone who has it will sound like the huge accomplishment it is.
Without my meds I would be in the hospital right now. No doubt. (Ok, maybe some doubt – I could be dead and thus in the ground rather than the hospital.)
Like I said, its not a perfect fix. I’m on 50 mg of Lamictal right now because we’re tapering me off of it. My highest dose was 300 mg and now we’re weaning me off of it so we can try something different. I am under no allusions that medications are a cure-all for mental illness. The right meds save lives and help build lives, but they do not live lives. That is up to us, the people that take them, every day, even when we don’t want to, even when they cost an arm and a leg, even when there is a stigma attached to psychiatric prescriptions.
Rather than saying, ”Anna, aren’t you afraid to be taking all those meds?” what you should really be saying, is “Anna, don’t you ever stop taking them.”
As if its any of your buisness anyway.
