Sticking to a prescribed regimen of medications simple: you follow the dosage instructions. When I was hospitalized I’m certain that I went through the 70+ medication trial-and-error as well. And, yes, I had then - as I have now - multiple mental disorders... just much worse then. Then, I was unable to function.

Function and Stability. If I am unable to function - if I cannot feed myself, if I cannot bathe or keep my bed from being soiled, if I cannot speak - then I need help and often the help of medications, in droves. But if stability comes only with continuous adjustments of the struts and abutments then I’m only the Biblical structure with the feet of clay. One dram of Melancholy and I may take a great fall. One dram of Melancholy removed and I may fly.

I don’t take any doctor’s advice without question. I only begin new medications grudgingly and, if I find that they’re actually detrimental, I stop them. I’ll actually stop if I’m simply pissed off.

Last year, after having nine pain diagnoses for fourteen years and being treated with large amounts of opiates and opioids, I was pissed at the idea of visiting a pain clinic every month. Cold-turkey withdrawal from an 80mg OxyContin habit really wasn’t that difficult. I doubt that ditching a .5mg PRN alprazolam script would be difficult.

Hitching my wagon to a minimalist pharmaceutical pdoc’s horse has helped, too. I feel, now, as if my brain had been dulled for years upon years and that cognition only returned as drugs were minimalised, putting me in that most perfect of all position: coping.

When we have tasted the bile and walked and fell upon the razor of symptoms of mental illnesses we may enter the “there is nothing that I nor anyone can do” state. And some, those driven insane by relentless and devouring symptoms and situations, those finding permanent homes in the dank and pissy rooms of institutions, those, those, are never given a chance to cope.

**** stabilization. I’ll take coping - the same road that my friends and neighbors walk - any day over a drug-hazed stability.