In-depth look at how meds affected you

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I really got the feeling that people who take such meds, especially in such amounts, are simply used to test medicines.
Stop believing you need all those meds.

related question: has anyone ever been on Cymbalta/ Does it make you spacy for half of the day? I have a friend who is on it and thats what she says it does.

I smoked cannabis for 20+ years before I found out I had Aspergers. Thought I was some kind of cannabis addict.

Turns out I'm addicted to the lack of anxiety it brings.


In the last 2 years I've had the chance to sample a weeks worth of many different strains of cannabis and have found that I should have been sticking to Cannabis Sativa all this time.

Problem is, Cannabis is illegal in most of the U.S. so all I could ever regularly get, most of the time, are Cannabis Indica varieties which, though they flatline my anxiety, tend to ascerbate my mental confusion with verbal and other instructions.

Since I've switched to 100% Sativas from the California dispensaries, life is F'n AWESOME! I've never felt better in my life.
As soon as possible I'll be making my own CannaPills so I can quit smoking and just take natural pills.

All pharmaceuticals leave me messed up in some way or another. Frankly, I've had enough. Natural, Plant derived, Self-sufficiency is what I'm after (although, 70 years ago it wouldn't be necessary as I could have just gotten it off the shelf at the local drugstore.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BASiUvW6Yeo

It most certainly did when i first started taking it, i was quite introverted and spacy for a couple of days, along with sleepiness which persisted. The trick i did for handling that was to take the pill a couple of hours before sleep so that it was almost a benefit from taking the med (in helping me sleep). That might be a good idea for your friend unless she is on the graveyard shift and needs to be focused there.

I haven't had that sampling luxury and didn't know until a year or so ago the remarkable difference in effect between indica and sativa. I started researching it because what had relaxed me up until a couple of years ago had started triggering panic attacks. There may be a prevalence of higher indica strains on the west coast, but the opposite is the case on the east coast. Sativa-heavy strains freak me out. So with it being illegal in the U.S. and never knowing what sort of strain I might wind up with, I've had to give it up, regrettably.

As for the legal stuff (which I think it's humorous and also rather scary that along with many of these meds it's stated that medical science doesn't know exactly why X med has Y effect on Z conditions, but it does...somehow)

Lithium: Crappy taste in my mouth all the time. No other effect. Discontinued.

Thorazine (old skool!): Zombie of course. Temporary institutional situation. Discontinued.

Mellaril: Zombie. A different temporary institutional situation. Discontinued.

Tofranil: Nervousness No other effect. Discontinued.

Elavil: Sensation of bugs crawling on my skin after taking it for a week. No other effect. Discontinued.

Paxil: Demolished artistic ability. Discontinued.

Zoloft: Drug induced joy. Made my head really hot. Felt like my brain was stewing in it's own juices. Sweating. Discontinued.

Neurontin: No effect. Discontinued.

Well, she started out by taking it at night but the thing is that by the time of the next dose on the following day/night, she was experiencing severe withdrawel, and had been for as many as six hours before then too. This has been my experience with various meds when I take them only at night too. So she takes it in the mornings and muscles through the spaciness.

So if Cymbalta makes me spacy and its the only alternative to Effexor, which kills my sex drive and makes me chronically confused, and I've been on literally every other med on teh market, is my only course of action to have electroshock? It sure looks like it 8>(

My doctors lost credibility with me for this very reason. These are powerful drugs that can mess you up as easily as they can help. I wanted to find out the source of my problems and my doctors wanted to prescribe medications and see the effects. I have enough problem functioning without fighting through the effects of these medications. Some of my experiences ...

Prozac -- made me really, really not care about anything to the point I got nothing done; no sex drive

Adderall -- me normally = obsessive interests, hard to devote any attention to nonobsessive interests, late nights, little sleep; me on Adderall = really, really obsessive about my interests, completely locked into those obsessions, days without sleep, sleep deprivation; Adderall also made me really horny

Wellbutrin -- my best experience on medication; actually felt like myself with some ability to function better but not much better to make an actual difference; lost a lot of weight; made me horny

Effexor -- the devil's drug; worst months of my life; no sex drive; had odd and scary side-effects many of which my doctor dismissed (e.g., I would sense that I smelled burnt metal and twice it got strong and I passed out (seizure?), I never experienced this before or since and the doctor said the odds of a seizure were low; I was driving in my car and starting smelling burnt metal and it scared the hell out of me that I might lose consciousness)

All taken for depression:

Seroxat/Paroxetine: technically relieved symptoms, but made me feel so sick 24/7 that the physical ill-feeling depressed me in itself. Couldn't keep taking it.

Cipramil/Citalopram: no side-effects, but did nothing.

Effexor: worked well on depression but made me very twitchy and tic-y, aggravated existing peculiar episodes that I think may be mild seizures really badly, and if I missed even one dose, gave me horrible 'brain zap' withdrawal symptoms.

the complication for my situation is that effexor works really really well for depression as do the rest of my meds. without them i'm miserable. I need something.

If the problem is dietary ok but I'd still like to have some of the meds in my system because some times one can't avoid eating things that are bad for you because its all there is where ever you happen to be.

As much as my mom claimed that my meds helped me become more stable, they really solved nothing, and in fact most people who remember me from the period when my psychiatrist was putting me on a shit-ton of medication would say that I was worse - unpredictable and at the mercy of side effects - on meds than I am now, completely free of any outside substance's tampering with my mind.

I don't even remember all that I was on, but I think the count went up to 12 or 14. Stuff I remember being forced on were Wellbutrin, Risperidal, Paxil, Neurontin, Zyprexa, Dexadrine and Prozac. One day I'd be up and unable to sit still, a week later I'd be falling asleep at random intervals; there'd be months where someone might have thought I had an eating disorder because I had no appetite, other times I would be an eating machine. I also got really annoying stuff like bed-wetting, problems with my bowels and seizures. Long term, a lot of the period where I was on 3-5 at a time I am missing memory of - like my mom will talk about events that happened during that time, things I did, things going on in the family, and I'll say "REALLY? When was that?!" That's scary for me, as I usually have a better memory than anyone I know. Perhaps the worst thing about all this was the side effects would make me difficult to deal with, as I was pissed off and having all sorts of fluctuations in terms of how well I was functioning, and that only led my parents and the crazy shrink to put me on MORE junk, continuing the cycle.

So yeah. Basically, unless I'm on the verge of killing myself or someone else, I'm never allowing anyone to put me on any sort of mind-altering drug, prescription or not. There's no reason I'd ever want to lose control over my body, my mind or my life like that again.

Umm... you don't exactly have much of a choice when you are sitting in their hospital, you know.

Besides, some of us do need meds, either sometimes or always. There's the anti-seizure stuff--do you WANT a short-circuit in your brain? Antidepressants, for people who are depressed or unacceptably anxious; some things help with concentration and self-regulation, which is a bonus if you have ADHD or ADHD-like traits. Plus if you're bipolar or schizophrenic you pretty much have to take them, because if you don't you'll end up not being able to think straight.

What I don't like is over-medicating, or using meds to sedate, or using multiple meds and starting them all at once so you don't know how each one affects you. Only when necessary, at the smallest dose, for the shortest time. Especially neuroleptics. People are passing out Risperdal like candy and I bet it's not doing the autistic population any good.

Anytime the side effects are better than the symptoms and there's no non-medical way to achieve a similar effect, then medicating is a viable option.

Worst of all: Not letting the patient have a say, not explaining what the meds are meant to do, etc. Basically anything that doesn't let you understand what the heck they're doing beyond "this will make you feel better". Docs seem to think psych patients are stupid and won't understand what a neurotransmitter is or how the brain works... I mean, come on, that's basic stuff; you don't have to learn it in the same sophistication as the doctors do to understand what you're up against.

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