Psychotropic Medications Or Not For Myself? My Own Personal Journey Unpacking My Own Judgements Of Mental Health Medications



“I just want to feel the emotions, and sit through them and allow them to pass as they should. I don’t need medications. I don’t need something to numb the real-life experience that I am having. I want to learn how to handle my emotions on my own without a drug to do it.” These were my honest thoughts for so many years. I used to think that medications were evil, and something that the pharmaceutical companies made just to control us and make money off of us. As you can tell I had a pretty paranoid mindset towards it all. I didn’t trust them, and honestly, I still don’t because they rake in an obnoxious amount of money, those evil pharmaceutical companies charging high costs, but that’s a story for another time.A struggle I have had in my life is to figure out whether I need medication or not. I have hit really low points in my life before, and I have been recommended and asked by many if I have decided to utilize medications to help me out. My response was usually that I didn’t want to because I had the thought process of what I shared above in the first paragraph. I thought that medications were for ‘crazy people’ and I wasn’t one of them so didn’t want to associate myself with that. As you can see I had such an awful mindset towards not just medications but people who took them. It was not okay. My therapist was also on the same page as myself, except for the critical thoughts I had towards people who used medication. He didn’t think that I needed it, and he still doesn’t to this day after 8 years. Even though I have been all over the place during this time of struggling with depression, anxiety, trauma, and suicidal ideation. Is he right or wrong? I honestly don’t know. The First Time I Took A Med I began taking medications about four years ago. It was an SSRI called Zoloft. I already hated saying the name because of the depression commercials on TV about it(maybe that was just Cymbalta). I only called it Sertraline which is the pharmaceutical name for it. I…