A friends facebook post really made me reflect on mental well-being medications how they may help or hinder sobriety. Not many will say it out loud although I’m sure a great percentage of recovering addicts are candidates for dual diagnosis. My young adult hood as early as 15 became a simulated blue print to,;institualization, mental health problems, and addiction. My addiction led to homelessness, incarceration, and more mental health treatments. During the course of this my drug use was running parallel with drugs like… lamotrigine for my bipolar abilify for my impulse control, Buspar to tamper down the occurrences of major emotional episodes, Trileptal to balance out the lamotrigine and abilify! Trazadone to regulate sleep during manic episodes Lexapro to aide the Buspar after wellbutrin proved to do nothing! several times what was working stopped so more was added to either counter effect, balance, or aid the already giant orchestra of medications. Eventually I stopped providing honest feedback out of anxiety, nervous that something else will be added Weeks and months of lethargy added again. Dope helped with the lethargic zombie the meds transformed me into, helped me continue to function after my buffet of pills rendered me useless dope made the useless feeling fade back to euphoria and eventhough I really felt like shit and my life hit rock bottom between the bipolar and meth I could climb everest in a second… sorry about this rant even more sorry my ramblings are never organized or stick to the point I guess that’s the adhd in me so I’ll just close with this hopefully direct conclusion but when I turned 27 I quit seeing mental health doctors, taking meds and with a very rough few months I quit doing drugs all of them both legal and illegal! I guess the point is we can’t go back and change our past 10+ years ago :that orchestra was never going to be fine tuned if I had just pushed through a few agonizing months I would have seen that balancing act for what it is instead of sitting atop my 5ft Mt. everest too high to learn how to manage my life without drugs. This reflection made me feel a rainbow of emotions which were all gladly welcomed. If any of this made any sense please add voice to this how do you feel about dual diagnosis sobriety programs?
What a story Jessica @JollyTrolli. Thanks so much for sharing. It’s my personal opinion that there’s double diagnosis in 99% of addicts, or they wouldn’t be addicts in the first place. I’ve come to this conclusion both from professional experience -I’m a mental health nurse working in a detox facility- and personal inside knowledge as being an addict in recovery with comorbid diagnoses of personality disorders (combined borderline and avoidant PD) and major depression.
Than again, there’s probably some diagnosis to be found in almost all of us once we truly start digging. For me it’s totally logical that there’s work to be done once we become sober. Detoxing is step one, and than the real work begins. The work on our mental health. However that looks.
I’m not in any 12 steps program but doing the steps is some sort of CGT. I’ve done therapy aimed at treating my PD’s and am now doing trauma related therapy. The only psychotropic drugs I ever took (beside street drugs and alcohol) were antidepressants, and those I took very reluctantly. I’m struggling with a bit of a depressive episode now, but again not willing to go the way of medication. Only when my life will become totally unhandleable (i.e. not coming out of bed or seriously suicidal) will I take pills again.
The amount of medication you’ve been on sounds way over the top to me. So I applaud you for going the other way and throwing them all out. And managing your life without them. As said, I’ll only take psychotropic medication when absolutely necessary. So there’s my caution for you (without knowing you or your circumstances, so take anything I write with a grain of salt): sometimes medication is needed because otherwise our lives would be totally out of control. People that experience heavy psychoses can do with antipychotics to keep functioning in this world. People with bipolar disorder sometimes need a mood stabilizer because otherwise big accidents might happen, during either a manic or a depressive episode.
I’d say do as little medication as possible (again, while not knowing you and your circumstances so not knowing what is possible for you), and get as much peer support and professional help with (non medication) therapy as you can. Thanks again for sharing and all success!
It is a complicated web, in my non-professionnal opinion, as many addicts have underlying mental issues, but the addiction makes things much worse. It is so hard to unpick what is what as it is all interlinked. In the end, the best thing to do (I think) is to quit the addiction first, using prescribed medication as directed to help if necessary. Only once some equilibrium has been found, can someone start to see if or how much medication is really needed. But there is no shame in needing medication forever. There is also nothing duplicitous about using it for a short time. Sometimes a sobriety journey really is a journey (it sounds like yours was).