My Experience with Psychiatric Medications

Photo by Danilo Alvesd on Unsplash

I’ve tried my fair share of psychiatric medications. Most of which I trialed during my early college years from 2010 to 2012. At the time, my bipolar episodes weren’t as severe as they’ve since become. Being 18 with a milder form of mania, known as hypomania, and long major depressive episodes left me less than willing to tolerate even the most minor of side effects.

Now I’m 30 with full-blown mania and deep depressions. I feel a little differently.

Admittedly, there are several I don’t remember much about. I spent much of this time drunk, heavily sedated, or dissociated. Nonetheless, I think my experiences on many psychiatric medications could be slightly interested, especially to those early on in their own journey.

All of that said, these medications work beautifully for a lot of people. So please don’t take my experience as anything more than entertainment.

Depakote and Klonopin

I’ll start here, as this is where my story begins. I entered a psychiatrist’s office and told her of my seasonal depression. I told her how I’d spent the summer after my senior year drinking often, confident, social, barely sleeping, and with a deep feeling that there must be electricity in my veins. Then I described how my energy had utterly crashed. I was suicidal, self-harming, and struggling to get out of bed.

Five days into this combination, my therapist made an insensitive remark. I spent the day making plans, before finally confessing to my boyfriend who took me to the ER.

I never went back on Depakote. After my hospitalization, no one would prescribe me a benzodiazepine for quite some time. Eventually, a psychiatrist did prescribe me a month of Klonopin. I abused the medication to manage severe anxiety, which left me short. I went through a week of withdrawal during which I experienced even worse depression and tremors. I didn’t go back on Klonopin.

Lithium and Celexa

Lithium is a mood stabilizer that is particularly effective in preventing episodes as well as treating active mania. I’ve also heard of the medication lifting depression and stopping suicidal thoughts. This is probably why they prescribed it to me during my hospitalization.

All that I really remember of this stage is that the Lithium blood tests overwhelmed me and the tremors were more than I could handle at the time. Admittedly, these tremors can be treated with medication, or managed by eating salty foods. I wasn’t aware of this at the time. Nonetheless, I decided to pull myself off the lithium.

However, I became incredibly manic and developed psychosis shortly after. I spent hours on a futon one night waiting for my boyfriend to survive, out of fear that someone was waiting beneath and would get me if I stepped off the edge. I stayed up drinking vodka and orange juice one night while writing about my history as a celestial being, here to rule humanity, failing my objective due to the drugs that were forced on me.

I barely stayed on campus, due to fear that others were watching me. I ended up changing psychiatrists and would refuse any medication that wasn’t on the Walmart $4 list. I would show up in his office, demand an emergency appointment, and wait in the waiting room until he found time to see me. Sometimes this involved pacing. Sometimes it involved sitting on my hands so that I wouldn’t float away like a balloon.

Admittedly, I don’t remember anything really about Celexa. My environment was abysmal. I had a terrible living situation and very little money. We were staying up to all hours of the night drinking and hanging out with friends, while they worked on an EP for my husband’s band.

Nothing in my life was conducive to stability. I was also an incredibly uncompliant patient who refused to try and manage or treat side effects.

Seroquel

Here is where the progression gets particularly out of order. My memory is muddled and convoluted. So please keep that in mind and give me some grace here.

Seroquel is known for two things in particular: sedation and weight gain. The sedative impact makes sense. It’s a hard-hitting anti-psychotic. Deep, restorative sleep is like Mania’s number one enemy. But I absolutely could not function on Seroquel. I remember three particular instances on this medication that led me to discontinuation.

1. I would drink on it and become belligerent. I clearly remember laying on the side of the bed with a bottle of Smirnoff and telling my boyfriend (now husband) how exactly I wanted to try and kill myself with the said bottle. I hope he doesn’t remember that. But I always will.
2. One night, after visiting my boyfriend’s parents, we munched on a few pepperoni rolls my now mother-in-law had baked. If you’re not familiar, they’re a West Virginia delicacy. I asked my boyfriend if there were any left and he confessed that he’d just thrown the last part of the last pepperoni roll… past my face and out my window. I hadn’t noticed this at all.
3. Possibly the most embarrassing was the night he carried me to and from the toilet to pee. I’ll say no more.

For the record, I was on a low dose which is, oddly, known to be more sedative than higher doses. Also, many reports that this side effect goes away for them. I wouldn’t know because I was a highly non-compliant patient who wouldn’t google anything and my doctors were subpar.

Abilify

Have your arms and legs ever wanted to climb the wall without you? Have you ever felt so much restlessness in your bone that sitting down is literally painful? Because that’s called Akathisia and that’s exactly what it did for me.

It’s also worth noting that this can be treated through a handful of medications or a decreased dose.

Risperdal

This was, quite possibly, the most useless medication I’d tried. I was manic when my boyfriend asked me if I’d like to go to Universal Studios with him and some friends for spring break. I called up our financial aid office, told them I needed another loan for books, and blew $1,000 on an iPod Touch and whatever I wanted to do in Florida.

I popped a Seroqeul there and back to sleep most of the way. Then, with my psychiatrist’s approval, popped Risperdal like candy to make the racing thoughts stop. I felt like my brain was running away from me and everyone I traveled with was so. god. damn. slow.

Did nothing.

Haldol

Haldol is an old antipsychotic that is primarily used to sedate violent or belligerent hospital patients. However, as a $4 medication, I had to give it a go. Just ignore the fact that it has a high risk of tardive dyskinesia (uncontrollable muscle movements).

This is another medication I don’t remember much of. But I can tell you that my psychiatrist labeled this time frame as a moderate manic episode, for insurance coding.

Zyprexa

All I remember her was about 20 pounds of weight gain that came back off after discontinuation.

I wish I hadn’t stopped this medication so quickly, as I was probably only 120 to 130 lbs, even with the gain.

I’ve since been on Lamictal (can’t tell if it’s doing anything), Geodon (made me manic in three days or, at least, didn’t stop mania), Vraylar (1.5 mg very slowly brought me out of a multi-month manic episode with psychosis, 3 mg sent me running circles in the rain to cope with akathisia), and now I’m trying Lithium again.

That said, I’d try almost any of these medications again, probably even the ones that blatantly didn’t work. I’ve recently begun to understand just how pivotal healthy lifestyle choices are to Bipolar stability. I wasn’t even trying in college. Furthermore, so many of the side effects I experienced could have been managed, treated, or may have even been resolved on their own.

I’d love to hear in the comments what you’ve tried and how your experiences have been. Medications can impact all of us so differently, but reading about how others have reacted can feel very reassuring. We aren’t alone.