The Worst Diagnosis: Depakote

   I have taken Risperdal for 20 years now, and I am very thankful for it.  Trileptal is the other medicine that I think helped me be safe and functioning as a mentally ill person.  I take minimal amounts and still have a lot of symptoms to manage, but I can sit in a room and think all kinds of thoughts and feel peaceful and happy, which is something that for several years I thought I would never do again, even after dying someday.  In fact, for a while I felt so awful that I thought it was too much to even expect having one restful nap before my eternal damnation.  Part of why I felt that way was because I was on the wrong medicine at the time, and I was unable to get even a fraction of adequate sleep on any night at all for about four years.

   I am saying all that just as background information to share the idea for this post which is that I think it could be a good idea for people to see two tragedies when someone is diagnosed with mental illness, and for a lifetime of psychiatric medicine to carry the same weight of grief as the mental illness itself.  Some people are completely opposed to the whole psychiatry field because of all the suffering, which for some has included bad experiences in hospitals.  For me personally, I love going to hospitals and I also have had a lot of safety because of medicine that I did in fact need and did help me in some ways.  But I do want to say that my bad experiences with medicine, my dependence on it that requires responsibility and vigilance, and especially the horrible side effects that always overlap with the benefits, have made me certain that the medicine is in fact as much a part of the life suffering as the illness itself.  This isn't a groundbreaking opinion, and everyone knows that many people refuse medicine for all kinds of reasons.  But I really think that for me it is something new to look back and think, okay, I should see my experience as two illnesses: Schizoaffective Disorder, and medication for Schizoaffective Disorder.  And when I tell people what has happened, I should say, yeah, I have Schizoaffective Disorder, and I have to take medicine for Schizoaffective Disorder.

   I can anticipate people saying that is ungrateful of me, and asking if I would rather be one of the people in a country that locks its mentally ill people in cages and lets hyenas attack them, and I think that I would say yes, that might not have been as bad, and this exact scenario is one of the intellectual limitations of the privilege concept that people these days like to use to spread the guilt and shame that probably causes half these problems anyway.