I am very skeptical of the drugs that are so often pushed in the mental health industry. I have very little faith in the ability to receive a proper diagnosis without extensive, objective testing against multiple disorders criteria, combined with observed and stated symptoms over a period of time. My last T nailed down a few DX on the first session and requested I see the pdoc to begin a drug regimen. I immediately opposed that, and when he persisted, I requested a new T. The new guy hasn't said what he thinks is going on, but he is sure I need to see the pdoc to begin a drug regimen.

Everyone in the industry keeps saying that talk therapy and other forms of therapy such as CBT or DBT are the core to getting better. I've made it this far without drugs or therapy, so isn't it reasonable to expect that therapy alone could make some measurable increase in quality of life? When pointing this out to the experts in the industry we are met with the "well you need the drugs so we can get through the therapy, so you can feel better now". Yea right, they dope you up on drugs till you have some kind of synthetic high, and your unresolved anxiety is dulled slightly so they can say see, the therapy is working. Oh and by the way, your organs are messed up, and you have to take diabetes medicine, and your brain is permanently damaged from the drugs and you have to take some of them for the rest of your life now.

I think a lot of people end up hospitalized or worse when these cocktails of mind altering drugs are battling each other and end up driving someone soo far into an extreme that they would not have gone to naturally. You end up being a walking, talking science project who pays for their creative cooking with years of your life lost to altered states and hospital stays. The actual illness you went to get help for was so long ago lost in the side effects and overuse of this or that drug that a rediagnosis at this point would be near impossible.

I know that I am messed up, and that there are probably drugs that would improve my quality of life. I however do not trust the people I have available to me in the mental health industry to not screw me up in ways and to levels I can't fathom. So I end up taking NO drugs. And reading voraciously about disorders online, and taking tests, and studying disorders to try figuring out just what the hell is wrong with me so I can convince the bumbling idiots at the clinic what to write about me in my file.

The whole process is infuriating, and dolled out to us in 1 hour increments of condecending talk of how mentally ill people are incapable of recognizing proper treatment, and suspecting our providers are wrong and hurting us be it on purpose or by accident is some kind of further symptom proof of xyz illness they have stamped on our forehead.