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Welcome to Crazy Meds, your one-stop information portal for the mentally interesting. More or less. We offer a fourth way diverging from the unfortunate majority of consumer-oriented sites one finds on the Internets:
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If you want to get started now, just pick the medication or issue you need
to know about from the frame to the left. You did come to the main site, right? And your browser does
support frames? I know, frames suck, and I suck as a web designer. Fortunately
I have links to other pages all over the place, so even without frames you'll be able to
navigate around with a little patience. If you've never been here before, I recommend that you read the section on how to read the entries. It will explain our formats (the sucky old one and the styling new one) along with where our information on meds comes from. If you have been here before, then check out what's new. Don't forget to hit that refresh button.
If you're in shock about or trying to understand the whole overwhelming deal of medications and being classified as some flavor of mentally interesting / mentally ill / batshit crazy, or want to know what this site is all about, just keep reading. I know, the meds suck donkey dong. But you know what? When you're mentally ill and you're not taking the right medications, it sucks syphilitic donkey dong while a red-hot poker is being jammed up your ass. That's what it's like without any meds at all, and that's what it's like if you're taking completely inappropriate medications. And that's what it's like if you're taking neurological / psychiatric medications when you shouldn't be taking any at all.
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I'm sorry about the shocking imagery there, but you have to wake up to the fact that mental illness can't be dealt with by gentle hugs and pretty angels alone. When you're crazy, like a lot of aspects of life, you have to make a decision between two options and you have to figure out which one is going to suck less.
A lot of people are going to feed you lines about how you can deal with mental illness through therapy, prayer, meditation, and by taking various herbs, vitamins, supplements and amino acids, and by practicing Yoga or similar arts, by changing your diet and various lifestyle changes, and so forth. Well all of those things are really good. I do a lot of those things. Hell, I do most of those things. They are all part of a balanced mental health diet. For some types of mental illness for a lot of people those things alone may be the answer. I'm talking about mild to moderate depression, slight anxiety, moderate compulsions, stuff like that. Not being seriously sick in the head.
Not bipolar disorder.
Not epilepsy.
Not schizophrenia.
Not clinical depression that keeps you in bed staring at the ceiling for weeks at a time.
Not obsessive-compulsive disorder where you're checking to see that the door is locked for half an hour before you can leave your house.
Not anxiety/panic disorder so bad that the physical symptoms are obvious to another person. Or agoraphobia so bad you can't leave your house. Ever.
Not ADD/ADHD where you can't hold a consistent train of thought for longer than 10 seconds and are a serious threat to yourself and others when trying to do anything involving, oh, I don't know, heavy objects or machinery.
Having brain cooties is just like having a visible boo-boo. Bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, epilepsy and the like are the psychic equivalents of having a broken leg from a car crash. If you broke your leg would anyone expect you to go jogging with a broken leg? Would they expect you to even try to carry on with your life before you had a cast put on it? OK, some of us have had some really sadistic and messed-up people in our lives who might make those demands, but let's not bring them into it.
So, what happens when you break your leg?
You need to get x-rays.
You need to have the bones set.
You need to have a cast put on the leg .
You'll need crutches and/or one of those little carts to get around.
OK, now let's compare that with the psychiatric/neurological process:
Your initial diagnosis is the x-ray (although getting a fancy brain scan, even an EEG, is the true analog to an x-ray).
Getting your bones set is the painful coming to terms with your illness yourself along with any initial crisis medications and interventions.
The cast, crutches and cart are your long-term meds.
Casts itch, you can't move your leg, and trying to get around on crutches or in one of those carts is a pain in the ass until you master it; and that's side effects and the adjustment periods to meds.
Sometimes the break is so bad that your leg needs to be re-broken (ow! owwww!!! ouch!!!!) and reset and put in a new cast, that's the process of having to try other medications if the ones you try first don't do it for you.
Sometimes you need metal pins put in your legs that mean you'll never run another marathon again and you'll always set off metal detectors in airports and government office buildings and have to explain things to strangers; that's the maintenance prescription you'll be taking the rest of your life.
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This is the beginning of the 21st century, we can't yet
cure these illnesses, but we can control and manage them. How far out of the mental health
closet you wish to come is up to you, because the stigma is still very real, but family,
friends, coworkers, et al. need to know that some mental illnesses aren't just something
you can cowboy up about and get over. Your brain is physically injured, and like any other
part of the body that has received a physical injury, it needs the proper care to heal. The problem that far too many people have is that they can't see the injury, therefore it is not a real injury. Well, you can show them similar injuries here. Sure, that's not your injury, unless you get one of those fancy brain scans yourself, but pictures help people understand that many mental illnesses are, in fact, physical illnesses as well. If you're the person with the mental illness and you're trying to get your family and friends to understand why you can't just deal with it and get over it, show them the difference between a normal brain and a brain with whatever it is you have. If you're the family or friends, get some understanding yourself. So are we clear that mental illness is an injury? Good. What do you do when you're injured? You treat the injury. The meds are the main part of the treatment. They aren't everything. Just as with a broken leg you need to be taught how to walk with crutches, you still need to do all the other stuff like the talk therapy and the Yoga and the lifestyle changes and the new diet and everything else. But it all starts with the meds. Without the meds you're just going to keep getting worse, no matter how much you delude yourself into thinking otherwise. That especially applies to people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, as they are the worst about not taking meds, let alone admitting they are even ill. There's even a term for it, anosognosia. It's pretty obvious what the deal about the meds is. With schizophrenia various paranoid ideations arise about the meds, or delusions about magical healings are brought to fore, or sometimes you just think you're better than the meds. With bipolar disorder it's the opposite, we often have this Nietzschean arrogance that we're better than the meds at dealing with our issues, with occasional paranoid delusions or ecstasies of miracle healing. Trust me, I've been there. I write from experience. And I'm not the only one who has been down that path. Sometimes it's not anosognosia. Sometimes the side effects just suck so much donkey dong that we just don't want to take any more drugs ever again. Don't worry, we'll try to deal with that issue here. If you'd rather live in the 18th century and trust your mental health to the herbal recommendations made by a patchouli-drenched clerk with a lip ring working in some vitamin shop, then this site is not for you. While the addition of vitamins, minerals, amino acids and yes, even herbs, can be helpful in achieving proper mental balance, using them alone is equivalent to just using splints to help heal a broken leg. For a sprained ankle splints are sort of OK. You've got to ask yourself, just how bad is it? Really? Sprained ankle bad or broken leg bad? Go back over your life and think about what you've done to yourself and the people around you. It's part of the 12 Step Method to Stay On Medications, Step 4: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Step 5: Admit to God, to ourselves and to other human beings the exact nature of wrongs. You've done some fucked-up stuff, haven't you? Or the extent of your suffering has been so bad that it affects the people around you. That's broken leg bad my friends. Maybe you really do need meds right now. If so, you need the right meds. Because for some conditions, such as epilepsy and bipolar disorder, these imperfect meds are going to be life-long companions until something better comes along. For other conditions they're much more like the cast in the broken leg analogy, something that is inconvenient and a real pain in the ass to deal with, but is still temporary. That's why I put this site together, to help you along with your doctor, therapist and pharmacist, the people with whom you should be discussing medications before you go looking them up on some stupid Internet site, get you the right medications as quickly as possible. To help you collect the best available information and make an informed decision. A lot of that information will be on this site, a lot of that information will be on other sites to which there are links from this site. Let crazymedz.com be your portal to quality information about mental health. Sometimes someone will be in crisis and they will need a crisis medication like Zyprexa (olanzapine). In a bipolar disorder or schizophrenic crisis, there is usually nothing better than Zyprexa (olanzapine), but for long-term use, there are lots of better medications for either condition. Or maybe Zyprexa (olanzapine) is the best medication for their long-term use. There are many, many factors involved in trying to determine that. But if someone is really wigging out, anything is better than nothing to try to get them to calm down and clear their head a bit so they can start making somewhat more rational decisions about a treatment plan. Many people don't seek real help, the kind of help that involves medications, until it reaches the crisis stage. I should know, I've been down that road. Twice. Now I have far too much experience with medications. So your crisis medications won't necessarily be the medications you're always going to be taking. So maybe you're like me and you've got a supragenius neuropsychiatrist who takes the time to listen to your symptoms and side effects, of which you keep a detailed record when they occur, who knows about the meds and how they interact with each other, and looks up stuff he isn't sure of, is up on the latest research, has a pretty brain scan of your noggin, and is willing to go over all of the options in great detail weighing the pros and cons of each. (If you want to learn how to keep your own obsessive record on meds, start here.) No? Yeah, well I was up to my eyeballs in credit card debt to pay for my mental health. I had to sell my house in the San Francisco Bay Area and move to Montana to pay for it all. But if you read my blog, especially entries like Not To Be The Manic Me (or the version that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle), Nothing Nice, or Ultra Rapid Cycling Blues you'll see just how bad it was for me and how far I've come since 2002. Finding a good doctor and running up a credit card tab when you don't have the cash or health insurance is worth it. Believe me, it really is. |
But I realize not everyone has that option. You might be stuck with whoever is on your insurance plan. Or whomever is assigned to you by the HMO. Or the overworked, underpaid and totally stressed-out doctors at a county clinic. So what do you get? A 15-minute visit once or twice a month, sometimes with different doctors each time. Remember all that propaganda warning you about the dangers of experimenting with drugs? Well, you're pretty much experimenting with drugs when you just have some med thrown at you by a psychiatrist who gets only a fraction of your symptoms given the time allowed and prescribes based on the combination of what is on the HMO/insurance company/Medicaid's schedule of meds and the name of a drug on the top of a notepad left by a pharmaceutical sales rep. That's real experimentation with drugs. Of course the laws of the land and general best practices state that you shouldn't get samples of meds from friends with actual experience with the drugs, that you should only get samples of meds from a doctor. Again, those samples may be heavily influenced by who was the last pharmaceutical rep to pass through or what is the cheapest drug on the aforementioned schedules. It sucks, but that's how the medical system is set up in the US as of this writing.
In other countries you don't have to worry about that. Instead of worrying about the cheapest med you just have fewer meds from which to choose, because the pharmaceutical companies won't send some of their better meds to your countries if you're going to be too anal about price controls. We in the US can subsidize your socialized medicine only so far by paying higher prices for our meds. Even meds that are developed by European and Japanese pharmaceutical companies. And since everyone can see a doctor, the doctors don't have as much time for everyone. See, something about the system sucks for everyone on the planet.
I'm telling you all of this so you can be an informed consumer and not have to go through so much drug experimentation. You need to take control of the healing process. Doctors are not going to control your symptoms, you are. Doctors are there to guide you and make sure you don't really fuck things up, but you need to take charge, learn your options and find out what might be the right meds to try first, next and if nothing else is working. Some doctors will listen to patients when it comes to medication options, some won't. If you do have a doctor who does listen to you, don't go asking for a drug just because you like the advertisement made on behalf of the drug company. Patients can ask for drugs for reasons just as stupid as doctors will have for prescribing them. They've recently done a study on just that. No wonder some doctors get pissed off at patients who ask for specific meds. Face it, despite the fact that you're mentally ill, you have to work to heal yourself. You have to work with your doctors. That means not only being completely honest about all symptoms, but it also means making sure your doctor understands there are other things going on besides just depression or just moods swings or whatever. It all factors in to finding what the right drugs to start with are.
Of course you may not know what the right things are to ask of your doctors, or to tell them. That's why you're here. Now that you're over the shock of realizing that there really is something wrong you can start figuring out just what it is you need to know about these crazy meds. This site will be a portal for your education. It will help you learn about the meds, about how to talk to your doctors, about how to get over the stigma, about how to deal with various illnesses, and about how you can help your doctors find what medications, if any, are right for you as quickly as possible. The fewer horsies you have to ride on the med-go-round, the better. I'm not the font of all wisdom about the whole process either, that's why I have links to plenty of other sites that will help you along your way. If I don't have the answer you're looking for, they might.
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But you what will happen when you find the right combination of drugs,
therapy and support group? You'll become a better person. Really. Sometimes you'll become a completely new person, as I have. And that's kind of scary. It's yet another of my wacky hypotheses, this one dealing with why people sometimes stop taking their meds after those meds start to work. Most of time everyone thinks, "Hey! I'm cured, I don't need these damn things anymore!" Which is pretty stupid thinking, because there is no cure yet, there is only management. But sometimes, I guess, some people are so overwhelmed by this brand new person inhabiting their body that they don't know how to deal with them. Someone capable. Someone likable. Someone who is not messed up, or at least nowhere near as messed up. So they decide, without thinking, to go back to the messed up person that they knew. The "real" me. Don't do that. You see the banner, the slogan for this site? Crazy Meds Suck Donkey Dong! Eventually they stop sucking, or they stop sucking so hard. I'm just not going to lie to you, the meds suck, but they keep us sane. They suck so much less than the alternative. Do you expect someone with diabetes to stop taking their insulin because there is a stigma attached to using a hypodermic needle in public? Don't turn away from the new and improved you that the meds promise. The right meds can fulfill that promise, along with therapy, exercise and lifestyle changes. Mental illness can be managed and controlled. We don't have to be powerless in the face of it. And fuck anybody with a white-hot, diamond-shard-encrusted rod of uranium 235 that wants to keep me in the closet about being a bipolar-autistic-epileptic-panicky spazz. This site is primarily for adults in the process of navigating their way through the mental health system. If you're an adolescent or the parent of one reading this, well a lot of this information might be helpful, but frankly you're still in that point in your life where you may not have enough life experience to differentiate between a hormonal mood swing and ones caused by biochemical or electromagnetic imbalances in your brain. It's not like the doctors are going to be all that hip to the differences all the time either, it's just going to suck no matter what. And even though the effects of medications are not 100% predictable for anybody in any event, they're even less predictable for anyone under 20. That's just a fact of life. My bipolar symptoms hit me before puberty, but that doesn't mean I can be of any tremendous help for you. As for parents of kids with any of the ailments I touch upon, the same thing applies. Don't give up, it's just you're going to have to go to other sites as well. Kids are not small adults! Meds can sometimes act way differently on kids and diagnoses are much more difficult to make. For instance, Paxil (paroxetine hydrochloride) is no longer being prescribed to children in the US and UK because of a rash of suicides, self-injuries and suicidal ideation in children on Paxil (paroxetine hydrochloride) Is it because of the drug itself or is it because the children were misdiagnosed, for instance they were either bipolar and misdiagnosed with unipolar depression or in the high-functioning autistic spectrum and misdiagnosed with vanilla OCD? For what all those DSM labels are worth, who can say? Of course there's no way to predict drug allergies or adverse side effects so adverse that you just can't take the medication any longer. Ultimately we're all guinea pigs. You may still have to ride yet another horsie on the med-go-round. With any luck there will still be more horsies available for you to ride. This site is by crazy people for crazy people. OK, it's pretty much a one-man show. Eventually there will be articles with other names in the copyright notice. Hey, if you want to submit an article, send it in! HTML or plain text, no attachments. But as you see in the disclaimer on every page, there are no doctors here. This is all information that has come from experience and research, and far too much of each. With any luck you'll just have to do some research. |
I'm glad you've made the right choice, the choice to become an informed consumer of psychiatric medications. Take control of your healing process, and don't be a passive receptacle for these crazy meds. Learn all you can about what your options are, about when it is appropriate to use these powerful medications and when it is not.
It takes you, the people around you who have seen how your behavior has changed (whomever you like and trust in these matters, e.g. family, friends, coworkers), one good psychiatrist and at least one good therapist and preferably another counselor of some kind (e.g. a support group leader, a priest / minister / rabbi / spiritual advisor, a competent school counselor, you get the idea) to answer the question if medications are really needed.
It doesn't matter what the problem is - major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, schizophrenia, OCD, panic/anxiety, neuropathic pain - they all suck donkey dong and they can all potentially kill you if they are severe enough. Especially epilepsy, because untreated epilepsy kills.
Let's be clear on a few points:
Not all things that make us mentally interesting are fatal.
Not everyone who is crazy needs drugs.
Certain disorders almost always need drugs. Face it, if you're bipolar and/or epileptic, meds are the first line of treatment. I tried going the non-med way and barely got out of it alive.
One of the many problems with the health care "system" in the US is everyone, the patients, doctors and insurers included, wants a quick fix.
But when it comes to the most complicated part of our bodies, the one thing that most defines who the hell we are, there is no quick fix.
Whether you need meds or not, if you're mentally interesting (a.k.a. crazy, mentally ill, sick in the head, loony, nuts, cuckoo, etc.) you will need the following no matter what:
Now some tips to help you decide if meds are worth the risk of suicide and other side effects.
It's really a very simple decision.
What sucks less, what you're suffering through now, or all the potential side effects?
If meds are strictly optional, then you can try everything else first.
Let's take depression as an example, because while I think while some people are avoiding meds who really need them, I really think that modern antidepressants are vastly over-prescribed in this country.
In the PI Sheets for all modern antidepressants it states that when used to treat depression, they are specifically for Major Depressive Disorder. But what is it really like to be depressed as fuck? Here's my take on it. Keep in mind that bipolar depression, with its mixed states, tends to be somewhat worse than vanilla, unipolar MDD, but mileage will always vary.
The thing is, you really have to be laying in bed, staring at the ceiling for days at a time in a world of endless pain for no good reason to be considering meds right off the bat.
Or if you have been laying in bed in a world of endless pain and have finally managed to overcome all the hurt and suffering to stumble across this shitty website - stop beating yourself up for nothing and realize that you do need meds! Your brain just doesn't work quite to spec and needs some fine tuning. You'll still need the therapy and everything else mentioned above, but you're not less of a person for needing a little chemical help. No more so than a diabetic who needs insulin.
And if all that endless pain is going to be the death of you anyway, what have you got to lose?
If you decide that meds are the way to go, I want you to find the right meds as quickly as possible.
And once you find the right medications, or something close to the right medications, then what? The meds are going to be a core part of this site and your new life, but there are going to be other things to deal with. Housing, employment, disability insurance, health insurance, money management, medical records, talking to your doctor, just doing the God damn dishes once in awhile. Everybody on the planet has to deal with this sort of stuff, it's just more difficult for us to deal with than for somebody who does not have a chronic ailment to struggle with day after day. Especially one that is invisible and carries with it the contradictory stigmata that we are simultaneously faking it, what we suffer is not that big a deal and that we should "just get over it," and that our psychic cooties are contagious and we'll spread our illnesses like a bunch of Bipolar Marys. As this site grows we'll be offering you tools and pointers to tools to help you cope with such issues.
So before you dive into the rest of the site, I leave you with a prayer from His Holiness, version 14.0 of the Dalai Lama. It explains, in part, why I'm doing this:
A Prayer from the Book:
Ethics for a New Millennium
May I Become At All Times,
Both Now and Forever
A Protector
For Those Without Protection
A Guide
For Those Who Have Lost Their Way
A Ship
For Those With An Ocean To Cross
A Bridge
For Those With A River To Cross
A Sanctuary
For Those in Danger
A Lamp
For Those Without Light
A Place of Refuge
For Those Who Lack Shelter
And A Servant to All In Need
The other part of the reason? We are in it for the money. His Holiness also said that there would be no economy without the compassion and sacrifice of others, so those principles must come first.
The Overlords of the 12 Zernox Galaxies have compelled me through messages in the Sunday Chronicle to beg you for spare change. So if this site has been of use and/or aThe Overlords of the 12 Zernox Galaxies have compelled me through messages in the Sunday Chronicle to beg you for spare change. So if this site has been of use and/or amusement to you, please see if you could
or visit the s and want to advertise on Crazy Meds, see our page on ad rates and policies. I'm all about fiscal transparency, so follow the money for full disclosure of my pitiful finances.
Crazy Meds Home Crazy Meds Talk About Antidepressants About SSRIs About Anticonvulsants / Mood Stabilizers About Atypical Antipsychotics About Benzodiazepines About Stimulants Finding a Doctor Sites with More Information Support Group Sites About Crazy Meds Visit my autistic - bipolar - epileptic blog
Take care of yourself, and if you've found the right medications, keep taking your crazy meds!
If you still have unanswered questions about this or other medications, including which
one is, or combination of meds are the best for you, your best bet is to ask on Crazy Meds Talk. Better
yet, if you want to let the world know how they worked out for you and want to help out
others in their quest for the correct meds, join the party.
If you want to discuss your issues, I suggest checking out one of the various
support groups online.
Otherwise, if you're letting me know about how much you like or hate the site, or
need to let me know about medication effects in private, then just drop a note to jerod23
at gmail.com Honestly, I usually don't have a lot of time to answer e-mail
these days. The snide autoresponse message that may or may not hit your mailbox is
going to tell you the same thing.
Another problem is that you may not get a response even if I wanted to send you one.
You see, so many dickweeds with malicious intents and too much time on their hands have
appropriated the crazymeds.org domain name to use for their spam, viruses and the
like ** and now stolen it **. Subsequently some lazy-ass e-mail protection software authors just go by the
domain name, and not the IP address. So I've been blacklisted because of the actions
of others. Or the software just doesn't like the domain name because of the
"crazy" and/or "meds." Or your question about a particular
medication will set off spam flags. So the e-mail just wouldn't go through
regardless. Sorry.
Hey, did you find this page all by itself through Google or some other search engine? Great! But to really appreciate the entire site, you need to start here.
Created Saturday, October 25, 2003
Last updated Thursday, September 27, 2007
Copyright © 2003 - 2007 Jerod Poore. All rights reserved.
Almost all of the material on this site is copyright © 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 Jerod Poore. Except, of course, the PI sheets, those are the property of the drug companies who developed the drugs the sheets are about. And any documents that are written by other people which may be posted to this site will remain the property of the original authors. You cannot reproduce this page or any other material on this site outside of the boundaries of fair use copying without the express permission of the copyright holder. That's usually me, so just ask first. That means if want to print out a few pages to take to your doctor, therapist, counselor, support group, non-understanding family members or something like that - then that's OK to just do. Go for it! Please. As long as you include this copyright notice and the following disclaimer, I'm cool with it.
All rights reserved. No warranty is expressed or implied in this information. Consult one or more doctors and pharmacists before taking, or changing how you take any neurological and/or psychiatric medication. Your mileage may vary. What happened to us won't necessarily happen to you. Nobody on this site is a doctor, therapist, or a pharmacist. We don't portray them either here or on TV. Only doctors can diagnose and treat an illness. Some doctors tend to get pissed off by patients who know too much about medications, so tread lightly when and where appropriate. Diagnosing yourself from a website is like defending yourself in court, you suddenly have a fool for a doctor. Don't be a cyberchondriac, thinking you have every disease you see a website about, or that you'll get every side effect from every medication. Self-prescribing is just as dangerous. All information on this site has been obtained through personal experience, the experiences of my friends, the experiences of people reported on online support groups, and from sources that are referenced throughout the site. Know your sources! As such the information presented here is not a substitute for real medical advice from your real doctor, just a compliment to it. No neurologists, psychiatrists, therapists or pharmacists were harmed in the production of this website. All brand names of the drugs listed in this site are the trademarks of the companies listed after them in the pages about the drugs, even though those companies may or may not have been acquired by other companies who may or may not be listed in this site by the time you read this. Always read the PI sheet that comes with your medications and never ever throw them away. If you didn't get a PI sheet, demand one. Loudly. Crazy Meds is not responsible for the content of sites we provide links to. We like them, or they're paid advertisements, or they're something you should read to make an informed decision about a particular med. Sometimes they're more than one of those things. But what's on those sites is their business, not ours. Very little information about visitors to this site is collected or saved. And from time to time I do look at search terms used to find it in an effort to make the information I present more relevant. Use only as directed. Void where prohibited.
"Everything is true, nothing is permitted." - Jerod Poore
