An interesting thought from McManamy:

All our current psychiatric meds are the result of serendipitous discovery, based on old technologies. They get some of the people somewhat better some of the time, and we have no idea why. The drug industry made vast sums of money essentially putting old pills in new bottles. That era is just about over.

The new era would involve finding the precise illness pathways that cause specific mental illness symptoms and figuring out which gene variations are involved. Forget about a treatment for all of depression. Rather, it might be more productive to uncover the underlying mechanisms to, say, lack of motivation. Maybe only a small percentage of depressions involve lack of motivation. But maybe such a drug would get a lot of these people a lot better a lot of the time.

I wonder whether this dovetails with brain enhancement drugs such as Progivil and Adderall, because those two drugs certainly treat “lack of motivation,” although not sustainably. In any case, an intriguing idea about the future of medication. I suspect, however, that we’ll remain in the Dark Ages of “serendipitous discovery” for a little while longer…

This from the blog Bipolarblast

Drug addicts can be made..they need not seek…they only have to find YOU who tell them the drugs are safe.

This is in response to an article in The Washington Post:

Critics say benzodiazepines are broadly over-prescribed and can have serious side effects. Some patients find themselves on high dosages after a few years because their bodies need more of the drug to get the same effect, according to health experts.

Unfortunately, there’s not a single mention of actual dosage amounts in the article. What are “high dosages?” 2 milligrams per day? 10 milligrams? Or does the dose intensity depend on the patient, in which case only a patient’s retelling of the experience of taking the drug can help determine whether the dose is high or not.

John Steinberg, a physician and former medical director of the chemical dependency program at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, estimates that 10 to 20 percent of those taking the drugs for extended periods will have problems with dose escalation and physical dependence. “For a serious side effect, that’s a fairly large, significant number,” he said. “It is, after all, a devastating and debilitating adverse effect for those who experience it.”

Increasing the dose is clearly the doctor’s purview, but the patient bears some responsibility in the matter. Facts on benzos are just a Google search away. Increasing the dose to get the same effect is a massive warning sign that something’s going wrong, and the treatment should take a turn for the better. The problem, in addition to doctors who don’t seem to care how much of a particular benzo their patient is taking, seems to lie with the patients’ ignorance of the drugs they are taking. Today, it is beholden on all people to do research on their own for every drug they are prescribed.

Again, from the Washington Post:

Robert DuPont, former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who has written several books on addiction and anxiety and maintains a psychiatric practice in Rockville, said the drugs are widely successful in treating panic and anxiety. He said that 90 percent of his patients have no difficulty taking the medicine, and those with problems are most likely to be people who’ve had issues with addiction in the past.

“The typical patient that I see with anxiety is taking [benzodiazepines] well within the green-light zone,” he said. Addiction is an entirely different issue, having to do with a person “essentially falling in love with a chemical high,” he said. “For those people, they’re booze in the form of a pill.”

Again, it comes down to the patient being honest with themselves and with their doctors. Correct dosage of benzos relies almost entirely on a patient’s ability to understand what the drug is doing for them. Is it knocking them out hard, blurring out the world and making all their anxieties go away? Then the dose may be too high. Is it helping in some small way while the patient keeps in mind the addictive qualities of the drug? Then things will be all right.

Research the drugs you take. I wish every patient taking meds for psychiatric illnesses had the opportunity or the knowledge to do their own research. These are still the dark ages, and P-docs are shooting their arrows in that dark. They don’t know what dose will work until the patient tells them so, and of course doctors who are not the best will leave you on the pills so long as they seem to be working and YOU continue to say they’re working. Addiction to medication is a two-way street, to use a tired old cliche, and it’s time patients took greater control of their mood-altering drugs.

I am nowhere near the top of Google’s results for the search for “clonazepam,” yet that’s the search term that sends me all my (meagre) traffic. Where are people finding this link? How many pages of Google results must they be paging through to find this page?

It’s the post called “A little something” and it’s burning up the charts, relatively speaking. I get at least a couple of hits on that post per day. Lot of people out there looking for clonazepam. Go to a doctor, that’s the easiest way, people.

For me, it’s like an electric shock in the middle of the night. Hello, world! I’m awake! It’s 4 a.m. and it’s time to get something started. On nights when I’m extremely tired I just sit on the side of the bed, swaying slightly until I fall back onto my pillow. Nights when I’ve gotten enough sleep I’m out of bed and into my office and onto the computer to shop. Not to buy, because right now I don’t have the discretionary money, but to shop. Often for electronics, gadgets, sometimes for music. I need something when the Abilify is kicking in hard, but I don’t know what I need, so the feeling turns into a wanting kind of experience. May be mini-mania. May be a side effect of the drug.

I’ve been on it nearly a year now, and it still does this to me.