My experience with the mental health system has been nothing short of horrible.
I've tried prozac, celexa, paxil, zoloft, depakote, risperidone, klonopin, ativan, serequel, geodone, and lithium, to name just a few. I had no side effects with the anti depressants, but they didn't help my mood at all (and I gave them a lot of time at the proper dose for my weight). The anti psychotics made me extremely illl. I seemed to have gotten far more side effects than most people do on them (seriously, I had almost all the side effects listed). Oh, and they didn't help at all, and made things 10x worse. Depakote caused severe dizziness and hair loss, while lithium caused tremors and blurred vision. Again, didn't do anything for mood.
I was diagnosed with panic disorder as a teenager, but was never told this, and at least a dozen appointments with medical doctors for physical issues were being attributed to panic disorder without my knowledge, effectively causing the doctors to undermine everything I said. I only found out about the diagnosis at age 18 when I started going through my files.
It turns out I just had Orthostatic hypotension, which is where your blood pressure changes suddenly when standing up or stretching. In my case, it caused light headiness to the point of nearly fainting, especially in school, which of course generated some anxiety. It turns out my mother and grandmother have this as well, but I was able to improve it by drinking a lot more water and not sitting for long (which wasn't an option in school, unfortunately). My vitamin B12 (which can cause the condition) also tested at 450, which is considered normal in the US, but in Japan anything under 500 is treated.
I was also diagnosed with major depression at age 12, hence the antidepressants. I really just hated school and didn't adjust well. Not much more to say about it. Same thing happened in high school, although by my senior year, they changed the diagnosis to Bipolar 1 disorder, hence everything listed that's not an antidepressant.
That was a clusterf**k of medications I didn't need. I had a 4 hour psychological evaluation fairly recently and it came up with no diagnosis. I'm just really bad at communicating my problems to people.
The mood issues can be attributed to situational stressors I never learned to cope with, and bad lifestyle habits. My old eating and sleeping patterns were promoting low testosterone and high stress, and months of glowing lights and electronic over stimulation at 3pm produced the kind of symptoms characteristic of mania (also why I made those extremely bizarre topics on this site early last year).
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Basically all I had to do was exercise/diet, take vitamin d, balance my intake of omega 6 to omega 3, and go outside more often, oh, and stop visiting the quacks recognized as doctors. Most recently they were looking at ADD and personality disorders. ugh. My curiosity over what they'll come up with next is almost drawing me back to them.
I wouldn't consider myself anti medication, because obviously it helps some people (they helped me in an unintended way by making me sick to the point I said no more and gained the will to change myself), but I also don't think it's the best option for people most of the time. I guess that's medication-ambivalent. I think the chemical imbalance theory will be viewed in the same light as phrenology in the future. The mind just isn't that simple.
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Anyone ever take the MMPI2? I found a copy of it online and it said I was a depressed schizophrenic psychopath
