has the long term use of medication made me stupid?

Hi everyone, I hope you are finding yourself in the best place possible for the moment and send postive thoughts and energy to you all.

I was recently talking to my medical doc about the possibility of have been "brain damaged" by my long term psychosis episode or subsequent treatments throughout the years (ECT, meds)...basically i said i feel that i have become stupid. I know that i am losing abilities, i do not make connections and i cannot access my memory, I have been taking medication for nearly 15 years and he suggested that it could be a result of long term medication use...I am going for Neuro-Psych testing at the end of march and he said that we will do it again in a year to measure if any dementia is present...i am 41 and am kinda taken aback, nervous but oddly hopeful. My pdoc is excited about this testing, but all i know about it is it will take four hours lol.

Has anyone else experienced this? Has anyone had Neuro-psych testing done? I play brain games constantly for my memory, but are there any other suggestions to help regain what i feel like i am losing more rapidly now that even five years ago. thanks in adavance!

From what I know learning languages is good for your brain because it enhances some connections or something (but it is one of the tasks that is hard to maintain and gets difficult with age).

Can you think of a field you are interested in and can learn something more about? Don't know how much time you have on your hands. It can be hard to find time for philosophy or computers when one is uberbusy with other things. I think keeping brain busy with meaninful activity can help a lot. ANd it would be more entertaiming than brain games (and include other areas of thinking and cognition). The key is to keep brain busy. It also prevents thinking about stupid **** for too long too

I agree with Venus that meaningful occupation for the brain may be better than the games.

Neuro-Psych testing is a lot of fun in terms of the process. It was not fun to me to read the results. Basically, my results were extremely weird: I have superior verbal intelligence and average or even low average for non-verbal intelligence (I am lazy to open the file now) and the difference between the two occurs in only 2% of the population - in other words, for other people the two markers of intelligence are closer together. It explained a lot in my life. Even now (this is age - yours - and laziness, not medications) I see how the math ability is degrading and the verbal stays the same. I am so lazy I use the calculator all the time. I am sure if I just imposed a ban on the calculator use and started making calculations mentally, with estimations, and on paper, as I did in school, I would have become smarter - I would have regained some capacity, that it.

Neuro-Psych testing determines a whole lot more than intelligence. It will tell you what you are good at and what you are not good at. It is one of the most powerful tools in psychology.

Enjoy the Neuro-Psych testing.

I have similar types of thinking? As in, doubting my intelligence. Then, my new therapist said "You're not present". How very, very simple. I used to wonder why my brain could not act like other people. I knew I'd come across ditzy and forgetful. Dumb. But, I wasn't, I knew I had a good head on my shoulders.. My thought process was/is just so completely erratic that I don't pay attention to what is in front of me. If you sit still, does your mind race and think about other things constantly? I probably have ADD. But I'm not diagnosed as such and don't particularly want it added. I can't do math either, I've said before that I'm numerically dyslexic ;-) I just wanted to throw that out there. That busy minds can seem like simple minds because it's hard to retain information when we're constantly flooded with other thoughts. It really helped my self esteem to have her say that! I tend to miss the obvious.

me too! I sometimes have these "revelations" or "brilliant ideas" whereas they are just obvious for an ordinary mind. As was the case last week: after swimming, I go to a Turkish place for a quick lunch. I get meat, hummus, tomato-and-cucumber salad and basmati rice. Plus they give everyone bread with tahini. I am trying to cut down on simple carbohydrates, seriously. Bread I do not care for much anyway. But basmati rice is yummy and it is hard to resist it - so I sometimes end up eating it and feeling guilty. Then it dawns on me - ask for the meal without rice and bread! Now I do and everything is straightforward. But it is SO obvious, I cannot believe I was struggling with this food not seeing the glaring solution. So stupid, unbelievable.

I had the same question, have all these meds made me stupid? Have I lost ground being sick for so long? So I went to a friend who happened to be a neuropsychologist and asked her to give me a basic IQ test. (I couldn't afford the whole neuropsych thing.) She chose one I was familiar with and gave it. After I left for work, she was so anxious to see the score, she sat in her office and scored it right away.

She called me at work and said it was official. I am not stupid. I am actually in the same percentile that I was in when I was tested in high school. It was such a relief to know that all the drugs I'd been on, all the months spent in the hospital, had had no effect on my basic IQ.

May you feel the same relief!

Wow, congratulations! That, even though normally IQ degrades slightly over time (regardless of medications) but you have been able to keep yours up!

I'm realizing alot of things tonight that I do to counteract my bipolar without even realizing I was doing them. Again (from another post) I play drums and have a recording project which means I play all the instruments myself. I play The drum track first which means I have to remember how the song goes while I'm playing. I'm only 35 though and have been taking only welbutrin and started at age 21 and only recently began meds for bipolar which I didn't know I had for all these years. I used to try to learn languages but I can't do everything so I
concentrate solely on music, as that is an ongoing and neverending task.

I do feel like the meds dumb me down. Maybe it's only temporary. Psychosis tho, whole other problem. After lengthy psychotic episodes I feel sooooo dumb. My cognitive skills are highly impaired. Just in general my thinking is damaged to a degee. It always feels like I have to relearn stuff, and it takes a deal of time.

I actually feel like my meds do the opposite of dumbing me down. Sure, I'm not as brilliant as why I'm hypomanic, but I'm not as thoroughly thick-headed as when I'm depressed. What I'm left with is pretty darn good. My memory isn't great, but it never has been, so I can't blame the meds for that.

Right There! thanks so much you have put in words what i have been trying to, well, put in words, lol. I feel that way! but this is is my norm now and it is happening at a much faster rate.

Ya I totally get that, you mentioned a long psychotic episode. I have asked on here before about this and I did not find much info. In fact I have not been able to find much info anywhere, not that I have searched extensively but I have searched. I did find the following in the wikipedia.

"Tertiary brain cortex collects the interpretations from the secondary cortexes and creates a coherent world view of it. A study investigating structural changes in the brains of people with psychosis showed there was significant grey matter reduction in the right medial temporal, lateral temporal, and inferior frontal gyrus, and in the cingulate cortex bilaterally of people before and after they became psychotic. Findings such as these have led to debate about whether psychosis itself causes excitotoxic brain damage and whether potentially damaging changes to the brain are related to the length of psychotic episode. Recent research has suggested that this is not the case although further investigation is still ongoing."

So still no answer in itself, but it is interesting.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0310175130.htm

There is a lot of research into cognitive deficiencies and schizophrenia, which I think is interesting, when you are looking at the psychotic episodes in Bipolar particularly lengthy ones.