Medication as a coping strategy is really putting the cart before the horse.  When it comes to medication the trend is that something systemic has already broken and the pills are being used for a ‘cure’ or to mitigate the damages done.

As someone who must now take medication every day until the day I get planted, scattered or placed onto somebody’s mantel (I’m procrastinating on this decision) – I get tired of being asked about whether or not I’ve taken ‘my meds’.  Medications are not the whole deal, as you can tell if you’ve read this far into the site.  They are a part of the whole plan for success.  I am an advocate for taking one’s medications as prescribed without any self-directed experimentation.  He/She who have self for patient has a really lousy doctor.

From the paradygm of owning a mental illness, medications represent a big bag full of issues.  There are side-effects that are hard to sell and despite what the doctors might say, finding the right medication is not an exacting science.  It feels more like a craps shoot.  In the space of one month, I was presented with seven different medications before we hit on the right one.  As pill # 5 and pill # 6 were sequentially presented to me – the trust between the doctor and I was seriously eroding.  Pill #7 worked and has been working ever since…so far, so good.

I’ve met people who’s medication had been working for years and then suddenly it stops working, they’ve crashed and ended up back in the psychiatric hospital to start from scratch!  Others report that they’ve never stopped looking for the right medication or combination of medications to harness their illness.  These are truly tragic circumstances.

Let me finish by saying if you carry the baggage of any illness for which you must remember to take your medications – hang in there and look to some of these other strategies to bolster your resilience and continued growth from where ever you were to where ever you are going.