Medication: Menace or Miracle?

Medications can be a valuable adjunct to therapy in helping to resolve some of the distressing symptoms clients experience. Low mood, perseverating thoughts, worry, and more severe symptoms like hallucinations or extreme mood swings, are usually very responsive to the correct psychotropic medication. And yet, I often find clients balking at a referral to a physician for an evaluation for medication. Like counseling and mental illnesses themselves, taking medication can be a stigmatizing experience. Clients worry they will become dependent on the medicine, or perceive that they are "weak" when they are unable to improve their symptoms with talk therapy alone. Sometimes clients voice a concern that their insurance premiums or job security could be threatened by a record of taking an anti-depressant or mood-stabilizing drug. Additionally, I've heard some clients voice a belief that adding a psychiatrist to their team of health providers somehow makes the clients look and feel "sicker." Some of these fears can be addressed by adequate education and debunking the myths associated with these treatment tools. Most of us can understand how a diabetic's pancreas stops producing insulin, and therefore, to maintain life, a patient will have to take insulin shots. When a person's thyroid begins underfunctioning, clients are usually willing to accept that they will be on thyroid medication for the rest of their lifetimes to provide their bodies with the chemicals necessary to keep bodily systems functioning well. And many people swear by daily multivitamins to supplement their bodies' needs for necessary elements and compounds that enhance health. Psychotropic medicines, however, are often viewed differently, despite the fact that they work in exactly the same way the aforementioned drugs do. Depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder -- all of these illnesses share common ground with diabetes, cancer, and epilepsy: they are all biologically driven. Many mental health diagnoses are a result of too much or too little of a neurochemical in the brain. We may think that symptoms that largely are experienced or made evident in our emotions, feelings or energy level couldn't possibly be created by a biological problem. But the efficacy of psychotropic medications proves exactly that. When the dosage and type of medication is appropriate, the majority of clients taking these medicines will find their troublesome symptoms improve, sometimes dramatically. Accepting the biological, neurochemical origins of psychological distress can allow appropriate and effective utilization of medications that can greatly improve clients' quality of life.