I know I need to take medication for my bipolar disorder. I know that going without medication isn’t an option for me. I know that I am far too sick for non-medication options to make even a dent in my illness. These things are clear to me. This is how I know I have to take medication for my bipolar disorder.
Non-Medication Treatments for Bipolar Disorder
I have tried many non-medication treatments for bipolar disorder including, but not limited to, omega-3s, n-acetylcysteine, light therapy, lifestyle changes and lots of psychotherapies. I am not against any of these treatments. Some of them can work for some people. They are most likely to work as an enhancement to medication treatment, however, and likely will not stand as an effective treatment on their own.
And believe me, every time I tried one of these non-medication methods I prayed for it to work. I prayed for anything to work. But not a one even created a chink in the armor of my bipolar disorder. (That said, psychotherapy did offer tools to help deal with my bipolar disorder and that, certainly, is valuable.)
How I Know I Have to Take Medication for My Bipolar Disorder
One day, after going through years of mostly-unsuccessful medication treatment, I said to my doctor, “Do you think I’m overmedicated? Do you think I should just taper off and try without medication for a while?”
My doctor looked at me and said, “Well, getting off of medication will make the side effects go away, but it’s not going to make you any less depressed.”
That was when the penny dropped for me. She was right. Getting off of medication doesn’t help bipolar disorder in the least. It will get rid of side effects, which is a great thing, to be sure, but it won’t treat the underlying depression (my primary issue). The only thing that will happen is the bipolar disorder is likely to get worse.
(Additional to that, I have gone through a medication-free period since diagnosis and, to say the least, it didn’t go well.)
How You Know If You Have to Take Medication for Your Bipolar Disorder
So, it’s like this: if I was on a really, really stable treatment that included some non-medication components, I might be tempted to taper off the medication components to see if I truly needed them. That would be tempting for many, I’m sure. So if you’re in the lucky group of people that is stable on a regimen that includes non-medication components, you could, theoretically, very slowly, under your doctor’s supervision, try to remove the medication components and see if you would still be stable. (I’m of the opinion that you likely wouldn’t be, but you never know. For many people, it’s simply not worth the risk to try. Stability is very hard to get back once you lose it.)
Why I Need to Take Medication for My Bipolar Disorder
However, I have never been one of the lucky people in this position.
The only thing, and I mean the only thing, that has ever righted a mood episode was medication. After 19 years in the business, this I know to be true.
So even though the siren song of going medication-free still calls to me (I suspect it calls to everyone), I know I have to take medication for my bipolar disorder. I know that not taking medication is simply not an option for me. It sucks and it’s unfair, but it’s the truth.
Image by Ben Harvey.
I can’t take the meds as I get all the side effects. I can’t get on SSI because I need to have treatment for a year. No one will hire me because I have walked off on many jobs and been fired once because of my disorder. So now what?
Thank God for medications!
I have had a diagnosis of bipolar disorder for 18 years. (I’m 43 years old) I had my first psychosis five days after my youngest son was born, and I have had six psychotic episodes since. I take my illness very seriously, and have only ‘gone off’ my meds twice. Once ‘under the supervision’ of my Dr, but it didn’t go so well. I drove 700kms in 5 hours, absolutely psychotic, having had no sleep for 4 days.
I don’t work, even though I am intelligent and capable. I tend to fall in a heap because I am ambitious, and put in 110% effort. Sadly, this illness IS my life. It requires vigilance, and when I try to ignore it, it rears it’s ugly head and slaps me down into a heap from which I must recover.
Stephen Fry has bipolar, and has said in the past that he wouldn’t give up his illness if the opportunity arouse. I would give it up, in less than a heartbeat, and slam and lock the door firmly behind it. I owe it no gratitude.
Hello Natasha. I have to say I had a hard time understanding whether you have what you refer to as bipolar disorder or not. I read the part where you just have to abandon us because we might get violent or say awful things or have psychotic episodes. I have never had anything that you describe here so, I feel it is my duty to tell you what my diagnosis is. I have manic depression and it is severe; however, I do not and most of us with manic depression, do not EVER hurt people who love us. What particular mental illness are you writing about? When I get manic and NOT SLEEPING FOR 19 STRAIGHT NIGHTS BROUGHT ON A TERRIBLE MANIA FOR ME WHICH WAS TERRIFYING FOR MY CHILDREN TO WITNESS BUT even so, I took care of them and made sure they were okay and I still showed up every day to my high school English teaching job. I was born with this illness, Natasha, but it does not manifest until the late teens or early 20s. But there are always exceptions to this rule. Carrie Fisher died from her manic depression but the media said she had a heart attack due to speed. I am still in her Sunday 12 step meetings for people like us. I can tell you how Carrie Fisher really died and what caused it but that would be breaking her confidentiality so I cannot. Robin Williams had it too and so did most of all the people who ever were people that created absolutely incredible art – in every medium. Psychosis is NOT PSYCHOPATHY. If your siblings or family members mistreated you or scared you and threatened your life, their diagnosis is not and was not manic depression (bipolar disorder.) You have written so many books on my illness, why don’t you read my book, simply called, “Having Manic Depression.” I would also like to recommend Kaye Redfield Jamison to you. She is known, among my group of friends, as our GURU. She has manic depression. She also has a PhD and a medical degree so we listen and read every book Kaye has written because there is nothing like an author that HAS MANIC DEPRESSION AND IS SO DARN INTELLIGENT SHE CAN WRITE SEVERAL VOLUMES ON SAID SUBJECT. I am not a person that is verbally abusive or yells at people via the internet but I will always need certain meds that allow me to go out of my house without extreme fear. I managed to teach for 25 years without “getting caught.” Can you imagine living with THAT MUCH FEAR AND HIDING FROM EVERYBODY BECAUSE MOST PEOPLE DO NOT VIEW ANY MENTAL ILLNESS AS ANYTHING BUT CRAZY. I witnessed autism become something called the “autism spectrum.” If that is true, then we all fall somewhere on that spectrum. I got a little crabby when I read about the “bipolar spectrum,” because it doesn’t exist unless psychologists make it a real mental illness. There is no spectrum in manic depression and why Bipolar Disorder caught on so quickly is still mind-boggling to me. Ask anybody or ask any psychologist whose specialty is “mood disorders” and they cannot tell you the difference between Bipolar I and Bipolar II. Lay people certainly don’t know the difference so I call it “that innocuous term” for a serious and fatal mental illness. So, I guess my point is: I have what you would call Bipolar I which means, to get into the Bipolar I club, I have had to have had ONE (1) PSYCHOTIC BREAK WITH REALITY. At 21, I thought I could fly and that I was the Easter Bunny. At 52, I thought I had an endless supply of money AND I COULD ALSO FLY AGAIN. My manic depression only hurts me if I am allowed to jump out of a twenty story hospital window. I do not have tantrums ever. I don’t stalk, maim, call, harass, hurl insults, or mistreat anybody when I am manic. I do not go out of my house when I am depressed. Carrie was very depressed when she died. So was Robin Williams. This illness is nothing to trifle with. It is so serious that I sat and read all your information on my mental illness so I responded. I am not ashamed that I need meds. I am not ashamed of my very high IQ. I am not ashamed of the family I came from who also had or has manic depression. If someone says they are off all meds and they are doing just fine, then I question their diagnosis. Hey, when Catherine Zeta-Jones came out as Bipolar II, everybody suddenly ALSO HAD BIPOLAR II. One of my principals told me this: “I have bipolar disorder. I don’t have that manic depression thing like you, Carol.” I simply said, “If you have any bipolar illness, I am sorry to inform you of the fact that you also have manic depression.” She didn’t like what I had to say because NOBODY WANTS TO BE LABELED MANIC DEPRESSIVE. BIPOLAR IS SUCH A FUN TERM AND EVERYBODY HAS IT. It is a non-term for a non-mental illness. Now, Trump has malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder. If I were you, I would write about HIS MENTAL ILLNESS BECAUSE HE HAS THE MENTAL ILLNESS THAT HURTS PEOPLE AND WILL EVENTUALLY KILL PEOPLE BECAUSE IT’S PART OF HIS MALIGNANCY. You are so right when you say, you have to have a mental illness to really understand your mental illness and other people’s mental illness. Keep on writing because you have a following and people trust you. Please be hesitant if they say to you that they are taking themselves off of all meds. We all do this at least twice in our lifetimes with this illness. Within six weeks off my meds I became catatonic. Benzos are harder to kick than heroin and if your following tries to get off the benzos by themselves, it can be fatal. I believe it was in the 1970s when a woman wrote about taking herself off years of valium. It was scary to read but she did it all by herself. If you can find that book, I think you would find it so interesting and helpful. I wrote ONE BOOK ON MY MENTAL ILLNESS AND IT IS NOT VERY LONG BUT IT TOOK ME FOREVER TO WRITE IT BECAUSE I WOULD GET DEPRESSED. My next is about my fascinating mother and only a bit about mental illness. God bless you for keeping on keeping on. It’s not easy.
Antidepressants, or any psych meds, can be evil. I agree, sometimes it’s easy to lose focus of why you started taking meds in the first place. Meds are a blessing when they help you live your life. But when the meds either have ridiculous side effects, or stop working with time, or simply switch your focus from one beast to another it can be a bit overwhelming. The years of trial and error some of us endure to find one med, or a combination of meds, that help just enough is crazy. Once you find that dose, it’s a little scary to try again once they stop being as effective as they were initially. Meds are both awesome and scary as hell at the same time! ? Great article, thank you!
Hi mr friendly, I’m sorry for all you’ve been through. I had the “opposite experience” nobody noticed my “quietillness” in my brain since I was 6-7 years old I came from a family of academics and over achievers and being left to suffer alone as mentaly ill was my own little horror show with the added pressure of dellivering “results” or being labeled “lazy” or not trying hard enough or not focused or other positive thinking bs. So of course discovering drugs and alcohol and friends with a wild took of the edge for me and my manic side started developing like a nice little party animal that helped me “achieve” and go under the radar for a few more years but all that time I was it was so damaging to myself I had no real relationships with my close family , it took years for them to acknowledge the drug abuse and my mental health issues and finaly/ fortunately help me get off the streets before I died from an od or the cold or malnutrition or allt the above combined. And I won’t even start on the abusive encounters I’ve experienced during those years and after during my sober years. Because those are all in my cptsd condition that I medicate for . But before I could do that I had to sobber up and get clean and that took me-it’s a forever commitment- a good ten years before I could notice the mood swings on my own and seperate them from my “feelings” and everyday life, and after a LOT of struggle since being an ex addict I still had my family holding grudges against me and had near poverty wages blah blah I managed having a near breakdown to get a diagnosis /medication at the age of 36! I still had to change a bunch of doctors, drop my psych and in general go through a lot of pain but it’s progress for me. It’s a foot forward. At least now I know I’m not ” lazy” ffs.
i tried the medication for 14 years of my life. Started at age 12, parents drug me in front of some money-grubbing quack. And since this was 2003 and ritalin was a big seller, being a child meant you had ADD and depression.
In a time when parents were still afraid to give their kids caffeine or sugar, it was perfectly ok to give them high-grade speed and emotion suppressing drugs.. This was only the beginning, mind you.. Over the next 14 years i was subjected to SSRIs, SNRIs, neuroleptics, 2nd gen neuroleptics, anxiolytics, more stimulants, “mood stabilizers” and all manner of toxic cocktails designed to turn you into a body without a soul.
I suffered dystonia, tardive dyskinesa, I was so fat by 19 i was on diovan for high blood pressure, people thought i was literally retared, as in government check, drool cup retarded. I should mention that around the time i reached 20, antipsychotics were being marketed for treatment resistant depression, because i guess some marketer wanted to have a cruel laugh.
after all this, 3 stays in a psych dungeon, 14 years of life lost, a chance at happiness gone, and my sense of self stunted the point where i still feel mentally 12, i’m left with nothing.
i’m terrified of any professional now, i have night terrors about the bin, can’t hold a job, i cry alone all day and can barely function on any kind of level anymore.
I don’t know what i hoped to prove with this post.. i just feel chewed up and dead and i worry it’s my fault for trusting the doctors…. Don’t mistake this for anti-med or whatever, though, do what makes you feel ok.
I can’t anymore and i pray for death to come soon.
Without my current meds, I would suffer such severe depressions that I truly wanted to die. My husband was afraid to leave me alone on many occasions. After years of trying different combinations of meds, my Pdoc and I have finally hit upon a combo that works to keep me stable in a normal range and I have been this way for 3 years now. Once in awhile I have a slight dip in mood and my coping skills work beautifully. I do have side affects, weight gain mostly and just a bit of slowing cognitively, but without my meds life was hell. I would probably be dead by now. I’ve come to accept that I have to pay a price (side affects) in order to live a normal life and not worry my husband sick. I don’t like it but it is definitely worth it and better than the alternative. I’ve come to realize that sometimes one has to do things they don’t like in order to get the positive outcome one wants.
Thanks, Natasha, for reminding me why I need my meds.
I went off my medication completely 10 years ago. Wanted to lose the weight the medication put on me. I was able to maintain a high hypomanic state for a year by taking Omegas and vitamins and exercising 90 minutes EVERY day (missing one day would throw my mental health off). I also fought with people, nearly separated from my husband, who was broken down from a decade of taking care of a sick wife, and I was rotten to my kids, screaming bloody murder at them for unimportant things. After about a year and three months, I became paranoid to the point of delusional. Two things convinced me to go back on meds. One, the therapist told me my daughter was hiding under her desk at home during my rages, she was so scared, and two, my husband had to physically hold me down and grab my keys from me as I was trying to leave during a fight, because I was ranting and raving and he knew I shouldn’t be behind the wheel of a car. By that time, I was nearly uncontrollably manic, but the therapist somehow got through to me. It was the worst year of my life, and all because I decided I didn’t want to be overweight from meds anymore. (Of course being off meds, I slimmed back down to normal, but it sure as hell wasn’t worth it). Some of us just have a bad case of mental illness, and we have no choice but to live with side effects if we want to remain mentally healthy. I gained 60 pounds again once I went back on medication, which is distressing to me, so I take Naltrexone to help control bulimia.
After about ten years self medicating with drugs and booze and 12 years sobriety at about 36 years old medication and the proper diagnosis seemed god sent. Of course it took /takes time but after3,5 years I feel a lot better with than without. Supplements and therapy help, sure. Epsom salts too.
Thing is Natasha… You are still struggling with Bipolar symptoms EVEN while on the medications.
I’ve met and know many with Bipolar and many with Bipolar for many many years. Some have even gotten to the place where there is little to nothing left to try that hadn’t already been tried. They are not “any better” than they were years ago. They still have the cycles and they still have the symptoms.. only, they have the side effects and residual affects and the “medical” damage done by those same trials and trials of treatments (including ECT).
I’ve had trials and trials of medications for nearly 30 years; off and on. I have yet to find anything that alleviates and removes the symptoms but then that’s the rub, isn’t it? It’s not the disorder that the pharmas treat… it’s the symptoms and even then, the symptoms aren’t treated as they are to make one docile.
i will likely return to another trial of medication here soon. Lithium really is my best med so far of what I’ve tried except for the Thorazine that no outpatient psych will prescribe me. That said; I’d be more adamant of the pharmas if the magnitude of the side effects weren’t so threatening (I have a very sensitive bio-chemistry) and I could really see a “light” at the end of the very long tunnel.. that one day; the pharma relief I might receive would last longer than a “blip”…
Life, in and of itself, has a LOT TO DO with the severity of our episodes. If you live in constant stress… the episodes will continue to cycle in and out. The more stress and/or crisis going on “in life” the higher and faster the episodes become… regardless of the pharmas.
my experience…
Interesting article about meds. I needed that reminder today. So tempting to think that if you are feeling rotten anyways, the meds can’t be working so why not quit?
I would like to ask Michael who left a comment why he has more energy now?
i’ve been on meds almost continually for forty years now, so i guess it’s not news that i’ve decided i can’t live without them. people who do wash that pharma right out of their hair, i wish them nothing but luck. if perhaps i were not married with children i might be braver about toughing out an unmediated life, but my wife, especially, is wired to my moods like some kind of mental illness seismograph, able to detect a pin drop from a thousand miles away. big sigh: life is full of compromises. my young adult depressions damn near killed me, so i should be grateful that the antidepressants have kept me from since going that far down for that long. it’s kind of nice to survive, to see my kids grow up. when i was sick with colon cancer (stage iv) c fifteen years ago, everyone including me thought i was going to be dead real soon; strangely, my only regret was not getting to see how the kids would turn out. it felt like i was watching the best movie of my life and some thug was dragging me out of the theater. thus my take on the meds question: it’s better to be alive and mildly impaired than to be pure and natural and dead.
I’m 99.99999% sure bipolar medications will be in my future until I die, unless some miraculous cure for bipolar disorder is discovered. And even then I have a feeling that not all people with bipolar would be completely cured. Why? Because I think we all have our own unique “flavors” of the illness.
I’ve read many times in the last 10 years that bipolar disorder often worsens with age, especially when you’re unmedicated. I spent my first 34 years unmedicated (or improperly medicated). My bipolar disorder definitely did worsen over my lifetime. It took a good six years to really find a mix that worked fairly well for me, and even still I’m sort of affected.
At one point I was on three moodstabilizers, three antipsychotics, one daily benzo, and another prn benzo. My pdoc did eventually start chopping that cocktail back. I was fine when he slowly (over 6 months) eliminated the Lithium, but when he started touching one of the lower dose antipsychotics he had to increase one of my other two to compensate. Since November 2016 he’s been trying to wean me off of Geodon. It’s had to go that slowly because of withdrawal effects and mood disruptions. I’m still on 60 mg of the original 160 mg. I hope when I reach the one year mark I’m finally off of it. That will still leave two moodstabilizers, one antipsychotic, one benzo, and one prn benzo. Honestly, if he tried to take me off everything, which he wouldn’t, it would probably take years of weaning. Surely during that course I’d go manic and my doses would be increased again.
Over the course of 35 years I tried to ease off meds under my own supervision. The results were so devastating, I have never come close to trying again. Too bad, because dealing with the side-effects is another completely different topic. I have found some relief to being tired all the time using all-natural supplements. Unfortunately, I take a family of them together and I don’t want to back-track to determine whether it is a particular ingredient, or a multitude of them working together. It has been a long time since feeling more energetic, but very welcome at 65 years old.