Psych Meds Can be So Damn Cruel--What to Do?

A couple of years ago, I hit the wall with psych meds when I had a very bad reaction--racing heart, massive kidney output--to Lexapro and Risperdal. After that, I fired my doc, got a new one, and have worked to take as few meds as I can justify getting away with. It's worked fairly well since then--or at least things have been no worse than they were before.

Now, I've been watching a friend of mine go through a very nasty reaction to Seroquel, which said friend has been taking for two years. The friend is on 800 mgs., plus some other meds, and last night the friend started having tremors, was seeing spots, lost all sense of where she was and puked all over the place. What's more, the friend couldn't get the doc to respond to the situation. Hopefully, my friend will fire the doc involved, who kept loading my friend up on more and more meds even when they weren't working well.

I mention this because my friend's experience isn't that unusual. A good 50 percent of us have problems with meds, have docs who think the solution is more meds at higher doses, and still we have problems. I've about had it with this approach--especially given that psych meds work about 50 percent of the time, cost us hundreds of dollars a month and come with a host of nasty side effects.

I am really feeling cheated by the whole psychopharmacology revolution--and I know that I am far from alone in my feeling. The question is what can we do to make this situation better. Stopping meds outright is never a workable answer--we all know what happens there. Taking more meds doesn't seem to work so well in the long-term either. But no matter how many of us out here are good kids and take our meds and do the best we can with what we've got, it just doesn't seem to improve the situation.

So what can we do to level the playing field a bit? We can demand that pharma companies radically cut the prices on their not-so-wonderful meds. We can demand that they speed better ones to market. We can demand that policymakers and docs stop basing their pronouncements and findings on patients in the public mental health system--typically, the most worst-off patients and the most common research and training subjects--and start paying attention to how things work for the 75 percent or so of all patients who aren't in the public system. We can demand a voice and a seat at the table. We can demand answers.

I think it is about time the pharma companies sat down with us patients and--for a change--actually listened to us. Things aren't so good out here--and they need a good dose of the truth. So do policymakers. So if anyone at NMHA, DBSA and NAMI is listening, could you guys help us make this little summit happen?