Welcome to the Jungle. Hilary T. Smith

I'm just glad I don't live with them anymore—it's probably contagious.

1 DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association [DSM-IV-TR], 2000).

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      YOU'VE GOT DRUGS

      WRAPPING YOUR HEAD AROUND MEDS

      If you've been a happy, healthy person your whole life until coming down with bipolar, suddenly having to take psychiatric medication is a tough pill to swallow. Having bipolar often means taking meds for life. Meds for life. It takes a while to wrap your head around it. Meds for life makes you realize the severity of the diagnosis. You're suddenly reliant, or expected to be reliant, on these little pills to keep you level and stable. You're not as free anymore: you need your pills. Before, you needed water, air, food, love, and shelter. Now, you need water, air, food, love, shelter, and Risperdal. You'll probably feel disbelief or a yearning for your old freedom and try going off meds again and again to see if you can. In this chapter, we'll talk about the emotions, attitudes, and philosophical perspectives you might grapple with in respect to your medications, as well as what to do if you're prescribed a medication that makes you feel crappy or gives you bad side effects.

      WHY MEDS?

      Sometimes you can fix your problems by doing yoga, hanging out with different people, doing a ton of creative visualization, and drinking only the purest artisanal “happy” springwater—and sometimes you can't. Taking medication is different from other ways of helping yourself, because medication acts directly on your brain chemistry. It's the fastest way of getting your symptoms under control and the first line of defense against future episodes. Doctors prescribe medications for bipolar because meds produce fast, observable results. Manic person running around psych ward? Bam! Meds'll take that sucker down a notch. Depressed person sobbing on couch? Bam! Now they're crying in the grocery store aisle. (Meds can help a depressed person regain a little functioning.)

      Psychiatric medications have been criticized for this reason: because they work so fast and so effectively, some people fear that they're being used as a replacement for fixing the root causes and behaviors that feed into a mental illness. But medications are also very practical for the same reason: you can't deal with the root causes of your illness if you're too busy being crazy. It's another yin-and-yang situation: meds help you get to a point where you can help yourself in other ways, and helping yourself in other ways can help you be less reliant on meds. Think about your meds as one of several tools you use to create the life you want, rather than a bunch of pills your doctor threw at you to fix you. Don't just take your meds—own them. Understand how they work, why you choose to take them, and what they can and cannot do for you.

      Ideally, the purpose of medication is to bring you back to a normal, familiar state of mind—back to your baseline mood. The purpose of medication isn't to change your personality or turn you into someone you're not, but to allow you to be your fullest, happiest self without malfunctioning brain cells getting in the way. The perfect combination of meds should get you to a place where you sigh with relief and say, “I finally feel like myself again!”