What is the objection to pharmaceutical treatments? Mood stabilisers are a class of drugs that actually do work reliably (as opposed to, say, SSRIs for depression). Although I suppose you don’t really need a ‘pharmacutical’ company to use lithium. Doctors have been treating patients with lithium since the second century.
My objection is purely based on the side effects I’ve experienced, and I’ve only been on a limited number of drugs. Every mood stabilizer that I’ve been on has left me intellectually and emotionally crippled. That is perhaps putting it too strongly, but when I stopped the last drug I was on, my internal reaction was “Oh. This is what it’s like to be alive. I had forgotten.” The really upsetting thing was that I had slowly faded (cognitively) to where I didn’t even notice that I was impaired, even though I had stopped getting work done and stopped participating in relationships. I was a pre-op Algernon (or Charlie, I guess), and that’s not a person I’m willing to be.
I haven’t actually taken lithium. I believe it’s not as useful for treating depression, which is my real problem, but it’s probably a bad idea for me to have around anyway; psychiatrists avoid prescribing it to patients who have a history of suicidal tendencies, because it is so toxic that it is occasionally used by those patients in suicide attempts.
What is the objection to pharmaceutical treatments? Mood stabilisers are a class of drugs that actually do work reliably (as opposed to, say, SSRIs for depression). Although I suppose you don’t really need a ‘pharmacutical’ company to use lithium. Doctors have been treating patients with lithium since the second century.
My objection is purely based on the side effects I’ve experienced, and I’ve only been on a limited number of drugs. Every mood stabilizer that I’ve been on has left me intellectually and emotionally crippled. That is perhaps putting it too strongly, but when I stopped the last drug I was on, my internal reaction was “Oh. This is what it’s like to be alive. I had forgotten.” The really upsetting thing was that I had slowly faded (cognitively) to where I didn’t even notice that I was impaired, even though I had stopped getting work done and stopped participating in relationships. I was a pre-op Algernon (or Charlie, I guess), and that’s not a person I’m willing to be.
I haven’t actually taken lithium. I believe it’s not as useful for treating depression, which is my real problem, but it’s probably a bad idea for me to have around anyway; psychiatrists avoid prescribing it to patients who have a history of suicidal tendencies, because it is so toxic that it is occasionally used by those patients in suicide attempts.