Medication Ponderings

You know... ever since I was 20 years old, I've been on medications to try and treat my various mental health ailments. Right now I'm on an ADHD medication, an SSRI, and an antipsychotic. The ADHD medication helps me with my brain fog, and the SSRI and antipsychotic are for the purposes of mood regulation and energy levels. For me, these medications have been life-saving, but at what cost?

Right now, I feel like I still need these medications, however I also really wish that one day I would be able to stop taking all of these medications and just be able to function normally without them. Even though I think my current medications are essential, I still feel like I'm somehow being exploited by Big Pharma in some way for being stuck on these medications and not having any way that I know of to let them go. If it were up to me, I would opt for holistic treatment options rather than staying on these medications. If holistic options helped my depression to lift and my energy levels to not keep me bedridden, I think I'd be okay... but even the best of my attempts to try and live without medications have always failed. I wish that my brain wasn't so broken and disordered...

...But even with my faulty brain being the way that it is, I have to admit that it's doing its absolute best to keep me alive with the tools that it has at hand. For now, I like to think that my medications are a part of my brain's toolbox, along with the holistically therapeutic methods that my therapist teaches me during our sessions or gives to me as homework for after our sessions. That helps to put less of a damper on the whole situation. And I think some of this not wanting to be on medications also comes from some of the stigma that surrounds taking medications for the long-term. In my family, the motto is to "pick yourself up by the bootstraps" and "just get better" rather than having any empathy for someone who is going through something harsh that they have little to no control over... one time, even, my grandparents tried to shoehorn their way into my psychiatrist's office to get her to take me off of my psychiatric medications because they said I was "overmedicated". This was after I had done something to make them upset (which was me wearing my hijab where they could see me), and it really made me feel as though I had no agency over my own healthcare. They never did end up talking with my psychiatrist, but their insistence to do so made me feel so horrible. I wish they hadn't done that.

But anyways, I'm going to try to be less hard on myself for taking medications right now, but at the same time, I hope that maybe someday I'll be able to manage without my medications in the long-term. Even if I have to spend the rest of my life on medications, I still think I have the right to dream for a better future, you know?

Looks like I was wrong the whole time

It appears that I was incorrect this entire time about having OSDD. I do not have an Otherwise Specified Dissociative Disorder after all... instead, it looks like I have actual Dissociative Identity Disorder, at least according to my therapist, who is actually the second person to give me this diagnosis. I had another therapist prior to this one give me the DID diagnosis, but I was in such strong denial that I thought the first therapist was mistaken. This is because of my presentation of DID. I don't experience dissociative fugue or "lose time", and I thought I'd need to do that or be a textbook case in order to be DID. But, again, I was wrong in that assumption.

So I have DID. Now what? Well, thankfully, my current therapist has a good idea that might help me with settling the unstable activity going on inside of me. I'm going to be starting an Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) pretty soon with her referral, and that's going to look like me going to group therapy and other stuff like that. This is my first time doing IOP, but I'm hoping it will be a positive experience for me and help me to get to where I need to be.

By the way, thank you everyone for sticking with me even through all of these ups and downs that I've posted about on this journal. It really means a lot to me that you would stay even with the whirlwind that my posts sometimes display. Sincerely, thank you.

~ Mii ♡