Side effects continually outweighed the benefits for me, be it anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, sleeping, anti-nasuea, or pain pills....and whatever else they gave me in between to help fight the side effects of the last thing they gave me. That includes many over-the-counter options, too. Talk therapists and psychiatrists that were in the network of insurance-approved providers continually ignored the childhood sexual and physical abuse/teen rape/multiple domestic violence events, where I barely escaped death multiple times, and continued to insist I just needed to find the right med for the diagnoses they were choosing to assign.
However, my overall health continued to rapidly decline, I gained more weight than I'd ever packed on before (ending up at 324 lbs), became almost fully bed ridden, and miserable beyond belief, but hey, according to the docs, my blood work looked okay so I must be mostly okay, other than what they claimed to be severe anxiety, severe depression, severe adhd, severe insomnia, severe IBS, severe nervous stomach, severe respiratory issues and severe tummy bugs, etc....pretty much a severe life, other than the blood work results, though. Grrrr....
A trip to the ER for a gall bladder attack in April of 2015 is what it took to have me finally approach my ongoing misery and my health issues differently, drastically so, out of sheer desperation, as I'd become convinced I must simply be too sick to ever get any better, although my blood work looked okay. WTF? Luckily they didn't have to take my organ that night and I learned how to drastically change my consumption habits to hopefully keep all of my organs more happily functioning and in tact from here on out....and doing that alone helped me to reverse many of my supposedly chronic and irreversible (according to the docs and specialists) ills and better manage many of the others without prescriptions.
I've also found other "alternative" (complementary is my preferred term) healers in my local community who are willing to barter and have discovered much help in the chiropractor/massage therapy/acupuncture/reiki energy healing/sound healing/drum circles/chanting/herbal remedies taught by master herbalists/etc. arenas that I'd been taught to avoid like the plague due to claims of snake oils, pseudoscience, and such for as long as I can remember. Go figure, they ended up being the most helpful of all...but it takes a village and a huge amount of effort with a big ass dose of pure luck, it seems, as I personally experienced things.
I have damage that's been done that I'll be reminded of almost daily for the rest of my life, done by my own choices based on years of being mis-fed, misled, and pretty much left for dead, the choices of those who purposely harmed me through their chosen flavors of orchestrated abuse, and also the choices of those professionals who choose to treat everyone the same based on some stuff they memorized at some point that was required learning in medical school rather than basing it on actually getting to know the individual beyond a chart note or two. If only they could spend time learning about the whole individual rather than farming us out into different areas of supposed specialties, all the while generically tossing the most widely accepted/funded treatments our way.
Sorry, not sorry, for the debbie downer outlook/attitude, but I'm still rather jaded after seeing my sister drown daily in the pharmaceutical methods forced upon her after trying to get help from being sexually abused, my aunt taking her own life after living most of hers on at least 15 different daily meds that made her suffer even more, seeing the docs wanting to tell us my father simply had depression and offered prozac rather than looking any deeper to find the brain tumor that had grown to the size of a softball before they finally found it, seeing my mom suffer currently at the hands of allopathic methods that only work to mask the issue temporarily, when she's "lucky", while doing nothing to resolve and actually heal the underlying issues, then my own direct experiences. As much as I appreciate knowing there's a place to go for emergency care if/when needed, I'm a bit gun shy of their pharmaceutical treatment suggestions, to say the least.
I forgot to mention our local domestic/sexual abuse shelter that provides free counseling for anyone who qualifies and how much it has helped. Qualifying has nothing to do with finances or insurance, simply your life experience. The compassion, care, and support I've received there has topped all the other therapists I visited via my insurance provider combined. They say you get what you pay for....in this case, I guess I paid dearly for it simply via living through the things that qualify me to receive their services. So grateful they exist.
